Baby Factory

Volcano Weaving

Watch & Brush Up

Theme of the Week - WORK

All kinds of occupations. Tinker, tailor, candle-stick maker etc. Have fun!

Once A Month Winema Had the Power to Walk on Water

I have had a print of Vanda Hoff (who was a Ziegfeld Follies girl) posing against a curtain for years.  I carefully cut her out, cut off her elaborate feathered headdress and juxtaposed her against the Tongass Narrows in the northern waters of the Alaskan Panhandle.  Little did Vanda know she would walk on water some day!

Note:  The name Winema is Cherokee for "white bird standing in water".

Johnnie Walker

The Third Reich & Roll

Faster than a lightning strike

Running for President

Cosmic Race

big giant (because)

Background image is the Lion Gate, Boghazköy, Turkey, c. 1400 B.C.—site of the remains of Hattusas, the ancient capital of the Hittites. Big Giant orange juice label and walking giant are clippings from Angelica (thanks!). Mineral on upper right is rhodonite. Orange and white trapezoid on lower left is from a painting by Rex Ray. And the humanoid sea creatures on lower right and left are from Peter Paul Rubens's Arrival and Reception of Marie de'Medici at Marseilles (1621-1625). Border is washi tape.

I read recently that the reason why Rubens's women are not just fleshy, but strangely proportioned, is that moral constraints kept him from working with female models. With rare exceptions, he used male models and then gave them padding according to the fashion of the day.

As for the little non-humanoid critter, he looks a bit like the Gill-man in The Creature from the Black Lagoon, so I've decided to call him Jack—for Jack Arnold, who directed that fine feature film.

Walking Tall

Walking Blues

Theme of the Week - Walking & Running

I'm working on some collages of walkers for a friend of mine at the moment so seems an obvious choice. I've added runners too to make it more interesting as I know that walkers are quite hard to find!

MUSIC FOR GEMINI

Altered record album cover that I created a couple of years ago for an auction event to benefit an arts organization.

I found the album at a local thrift shop and culled through my extensive stash of vintage photographs, reproducing them in order to make sets of twins.  I then added some "scrap-booking" elements I had on hand...jewels to mimic stars and words that might relate to the cosmos.

I think this piece is another of my best collages to date!

Collage Parade

Collage I made this afternoon for a friend making a CD cover for some new songs. This one didn't quite fit the bill so have amended it for inclusion here.

Eleven Fantastic Hits

Still striving to do my greatest collage but this is one of my own favourites as it was one of my first attempts at an altered album cover and an early addition to my Flickr account.

Sale Of The Century

My sister takes care of birds.

My sister Olga is a licensed wildlife rehabilitator.  Her specialty is birds.  I made this collage in her honor in 1991.  As I recall it took a long time and I kept it on my work table adding birds to it every day for months.   I wanted it to be "just so".

I used two postcards, published by Dover, of an antique wooden Lady Liberty type statue as the central figures.  I kept one postcard intact and carefully cut the figure out of the other.  (I thought the wooden lady to be a tree of a sort hence the nest on top of one head and a birdhouse on top of the other.)  I then had a good time cutting up a bird field guide by Roger Tory Peterson.  The end papers had lovely silhouettes of birds (the cut out lady is pasted to an intact end paper) and I found every variety of bird within the pages of the book.  I framed this collage (using UV glass than goodness!) and actually took it out of the frame so I could scan it for The Kollage Kit -I also never had a record of it so it made sense to do it now.

I think this is one of my very best collages.

Collages Greatest Hits

The Swimmer

This is my favorite piece so far.  I don't think I've created my masterpiece yet, if I had, there would be no reason to keep creating :)  I love combining human and mechanical elements in my work.

the definition of life

I only just started making collages in 2010, so I don't have much of quality to show you that hasn't already been posted to this blog. But this collage was sort of a turning point in my early work. I think the composition works, and I was pleased to be able to incorporate meaningful text in this way.

The background is the Japanese alphabet, from Rossi papers. The ferns are from a paper napkin. The spotted ray is a magazine clipping. The central text is scanned from the definition of life in an 1880s-era encyclopedia titled The Library of Universal Knowledge. I have cherished that little set of maroon volumes with fragile yellowish-brown paper and tiny text (no pictures) since I was a child, and felt honored to inherit it from my father. My family—mostly my dad, his mother, and me—consulted that encyclopedia many, many times while solving the fiendish double-acrostic crosswords puzzles that ran monthly in the back of the Saturday Review of Literature, a much-read magazine in my house growing up. Those puzzles—the solution to which was always a long quotation that could be drawn from any field of knowledge, not just literature—were a competitive sport for the three of us!

The Tower of Babelicious

I think this collage is one of my most recent successes. It sold almost immediately during it's first showing at a gallery to someone who fell in love with it. So glad it's going to a good home. It's a good piece but is it my greatest? Nope. I haven't made that one yet.

Vesuvius

For many reasons I feel that this piece is my best. Seems to strike a balance of creepy, funny, nostalgic, meaningful and meaningless. It was certainly the most enjoyable collage to compose and took about two weeks of tinkering. My favorite aspect is the layers of dimension and that it reveals something upside down.

THEME OF THE WEEK : YOUR GREATEST!

Post what you think may be your personal BEST collage, or at at least an example of your favorite. One that really represents your work. If you have not made your best collage yet, here's your chance. Get crackin! Let's see some gold, people :)

Joust A Minute

This is the last postcard - I promise! I seem to have got a bit carried away with these!

Greetings From Blackpool

Unaware She Was About To Trip Over A Squirrel, Fall Flat on Her Face and Have Her Hat Snatched by An Owl, Henriette Strolled Along Reading the Latest Le Petit Parisien

This is a postcard I purchased in Paris..."Modiste lisant le journal "Le Petit Parisien", 1899.

Nancy Monument

NEW THEME?

Might I make a suggestion for the week's theme? Or is that already in the works?

Dream Lovers

Souvenir and Ball Guide

Llechwedd Cake Caverns

My Pink Elephant

Great British Seaside Day Trip

Cave of the Winds. So much fun, you'll never want to leave.

the maenad

This time it's a mashup of three postcards. I've always wanted to rescue Picasso's exuberant bather from the squished little setup he put her in. So I gave her some vintage Hawaiian surf, with a sandy frame around it all. And instead of the boring little ball she had, she gets grapes, and becomes a maenad!

anatomical moonbathing

When I was in my late teens, early twenties, I enjoyed sunbathing so much I decided moonbathing would be fun, too--and would have the distinct advantage that you wouldn't have to put on stinky sunscreen that stings your eyes. So I organized a couple of moonbathing parties when I was in college: late in May, right before exams...why not strip down and lay on a blanket under a big full moon?

Well, it never really caught on, but I enjoyed it. So I thought perhaps this late 18th-century Florentine "anatomical Venus" could use a trip to Florida circa 1960 for a night of moonlight, where she could hear the water in the bay and the palm fronds soughing in a light breeze.

This is actually a mash-up of two postcards: the vintage Florida card, plus a postcard from Morbid Anatomy, where you can scroll down and see what this waxen Venus looks like on the inside (her real beauty).

I'm Back From a Holiday to Paris & London!

Hi everyone.  Fiona sent me a nice note via Flickr this morning asking if all was well and yes it has been.  I visited Paris (for the first time) and London (for the second time) and had a very nice long trip but now I am back and ready to pick up paper and scissors and glue stick!  I enjoyed seeing all of your work for the past two themes on my iPhone when I was away.  This is a great theme for me as I picked up a postcard in Paris that I thought I would be perfect to alter.  Stay tuned...

Arses Of North Wales

Theme of the Week - Wish You Were Here

This weeks theme is postcards. Holiday postcards or just postcards that have been transformed in some way by the use of traditional cut and paste collage. I've started off with this one from the local Oxfam shop I bought today which gave me the idea in the first place. Have fun!

River Pageant

God save the queen.

God save the Queen: The british landscape.

Never Mind The Corgis

What to wear if you are going to meat the Queen and possibly chew the fat.

Wearing the latest in skirt steaks.

Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend