...And A Collage of Ideas
Generally Speaking...
When you think about it, everything in life is a collage. Even we are the collaged bits and pieces of our ancestors, with some things discarded, and others re-mixed with bits and pieces of our environment. And since this is an on-going process, perhaps it is better to say that we are all collages in the making.
Mixed Media...
That this mixing is such a part of us all might be the reason I connect so readily and fully with the medium. When I tell people that I am a mixed-media artist, I'm saying that not only do I choose to work in multiple mediums, I also combine them in collage. And I prefer to combine them in ways that are unique and meaningful, even when symbolically apparent to me alone.
The ability to capture information from a variety of sources, retain some, discard others, and rearrange things at will is a very powerful tool for the imagination. It gives one creative license over everything, making possible those choices that cannot always be part of everyday reality. The potential for invention is enormous and endless. Mixed media is a safe haven of power. What better forum to explore, exploit, and explode.
The Chicken or the Egg?...
Art does not so often illustrate reality as much as it prefigures it. In retrospect, countless inventions and even entire periods of history have been accurately portrayed in the artwork which preceded them. If you doubt this, just read Art & Physics, Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light, by a man I would have loved to have met, the late Leonard Shlain, who died last month at age 71. Dr. Shalin himself was a collage, and a synthesizer of ideas across multiple diciplines.
This title may sound unapproachable, especially since in bookstores, Dr. Shlain's work is categorized as science instead of art. But not only is it refreshingly easy to understand, it is a book which once begun, every serious artist would have a hard time putting down. Read this book and you'll never again wonder (if you ever did) what possible purpose there is to being artistic. In the last ten years, I have purchase two copies of this book for myself and have given it as gifts to fellow artists.
Elements...
As for my journal page above (made for A Prompt A Day), if you click to enlarge the picture, you'll see that the figure at left is really a composite of body parts and limbs. In this case, I drew a figure, separated it into parts, cutting each apart to use the parts as a template for tracing onto alternating pieces of Swedish text and unprinted pages. I cut and arranged the pieces into a pose, then glued them down onto backing paper before cutting out the entire figure. Essentially, what I've made is a paper doll of the purist form, and although dolls with connected limbs are most often cut this way to be hinged for movement, I did mine this way so that I could rearrange the pieces at will to achieve a definite pose.
I finished the doll two days before I began working with the combined photographs to create the central image for my journal page. When the collage was almost complete, I added the doll and decided its final placement.
I love challenges that give me a nudge, but do not tie me down to specifics. What you see above is not an illustration. It is a journal page with a collage which serves as a central focal point. But it imaginatively fits the theme this week at Mixed Media Monday which is "playful dolls", so I'm placing it there among the many other pieces of beautiful, playful and imaginative artwork that this wonderful challenge site inspires. Like everyone else, I have no idea today what place our collective work will serve in history, if anything specifically. But collectively, I'm glad to be connected to the zeitgeist which presently prefigures discoveries yet to be made, even if I may never live to see the fruits of this.
Right now I am...
Nibbling on veggies and cheese
Drinking tea
Watching the sun go down
Listening to a Donovan album my daughter picked up at a Tracks In Wax (used vinyl) for $1, which I never knew existed. I thought I had collected them all over the years, but somehow, this one slipped through the cracks.
Reading Atmospheric Disturbances, an unusual little novel by Rivka Galchen, another M.D.
Have a great day, Everyone!
