Happy New Year,Eve.

I'm Baaaack...

...just in time to wish you all a Most Industrious and Happy New Year.  Felicitations, Kollage Kids!

Serendipitous

Year Of The Spawn

zig-zag

I'm hosting a series of swaps on swap-bot where you're supposed to work with mostly neutrals (which, for this series, includes brown) and just "A Bit of..." color. This first swap was titled "Nifty Neutrals," with no "color" at all, just to get people in the swing of using neutrals.

Background polygons from magazine & catalog clippings. Central zig-zap from real (not facsimile) mid-19th-century ledger paper. Thanks to the influence of composer John Cage, I let chance determine the position of the black painted lines: their positions were pairs of integers in sequence from a random number generator.

it's rough to be a male

For this swap we were supposed to create a collage that is mostly "neutrals" (including brown) with just "A Bit of Red." I decided to work only with the clippings from my collection of writing, maps, & diagrams. As I put together the neutrals, I noticed that a lot of my elements (the ones that are legible) had something to do with men: men's hats, helmets, & swords; men fighting dragons; men carving tablets, designing ancient temples, building cities; men getting in fights; a man who faked his C.V. and wore blue eyeshadow; even men choosing restaurants. So, inspired in part by Hallowe'en, I decided that the "bit of red" should be a ghost of an unhappy man. As it happened, the only red I had in that box had to do with male-male competition in different species—fish, mammals, birds, etc. (!) When I cut out the little red ghost, I didn't expect words like "vigorous thrusting" & "sperm" & males dealing with rivals to show up so prominently, but it seemed fitting—and humorous to boot. The last piece I added was the big "El"—Spanish for the masculine "the."

dark forces are arrayed against us

With white colored pencil, white acrylic paint, and dark grey marker. This is the one I created for the "Bit of Pink" swap, but I ended up deciding it was too personal—too much about something in my real life—and that I wanted to keep it.

oblique-lined dottyback

This one was created for the "Bit of Pink" swap--the one I actually put in the mail. The fish is an oblique-lined dottyback. (I liked its name so much I used it for the title.) The grey cone in the background is a photo of a sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The handwritten piece below the fish is from a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Indefinitely

It´s one from the archive - but nevertheless it´s pretty new - from 2014.

New Year's Resolution #33

More physical fitness!!!

Noir Soiree

The Hide In The Highlands

Another from the archive.

Theme of the Week - OPEN

An open theme this week, suggested by Fi. Here's one to start from my archive as I'm still busy with Xmassy things. Happy New Year all!

Merry Christmas

Too busy during the last week - "restful and contemplative Advent season" !!!
This is the reason for this quick but honest "collage" - wishing you all a Merry Christmas!

(and I had a little fun writing the 2000 post :))

JOY

My holiday wishes to you, dear Kollage Kit participants!

Winter Wonderland

Another from the archive.

it's impossible to overdecorate a yule tree

Greenery background drawn by yours truly with markers. All the rest is from Christmas catalogs.

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Have a cool Yule! It's almost Sunreturn, when the days start getting longer...

I'll bring the Christmas Cake!

                  Have a nice Xmas time and the best wishes to the whole Kollage Kids Bunch!

The Best Christmas Ever!

Have the Best Christmas Ever Fellow Kollagers!

Four Prawns A Flyin'

From a version of the 12 Days Of Christmas you may not know . Also from the archive.

Happy Dystopian Festivities To You All

Warming

Sorry for the bleakness of my little holiday collage...it's just what I happened to be working on this morning and we're leaving town today, so it will have to do!  Hope the holiday season and the new year find each of you hale, hearty, healthy, happy and many other things that start with the letter "h"...see you in 2015, dear friends.

Theme of the Week - Festive Greetings!

It's that time of year again and so ideal for a theme of Yuletide festive greetings and thoughts of a Happy New Year! All the best to my Kollage Kit chums and I look forward to seeing your Xmassy collages! have fun!

Outtake from HELP!

Decorative border from an antique book.  That's a psychedelic Bentley (not John's Phantom V Rolls-Royce).  Lastly, John as he appeared in a scene in the 1965 movie Help!

'WHODUNNIT'

monster matinee

The giant lizard is a Gila monster, native to the American Southwest. On the screen are Lon Chaney, Jr., and Elyse Knox in The Mummy's Tomb, 1942.

I Lost My Heart In A Drive-In Movie

Title inspired by Jerry Lewis's song in The Patsy.

The Road Movie

One from the archive. Busy busy busy!

Now Playing At A Theater Near You

Sharp Curves

At the Drive-In

Pay Attention, Darling, We're Playing Chess With the Invisible Hand of God

Theme of the Week - DRIVE IN MOVIES

Yep, it's a pretty wide theme this week - anything with a film or car reference. Have fun in between all your shopping and Xmas card making!

What's All This Then?

One from the archive.

fur people day at the water exhibit

This one's an experiment—my first 11" x 17" (28 x 43 cm) collage on fiberboard. The water pictures are details from photos by Rebecca Resinski. The background behind them is actual wood—thin-sliced cherry. The Asian sun bear is a drawing by Amelia Bauer. The galloping horse is from a painting by Charles Knight. That's a real human being whose face is peeking up over the edge: it's a painted portrait of a man with hirsutism (aka lycanthropy). Except for the fuzzy white dog on the right, all the fur people are undomesticated.

It seemed weird to me that the vampire bat is purple, but then just today I saw a photo of another species of black bat, hanging in clusters in a cave, and they looked purple, too.

Cabaret Exhibition

Photography Exhibit - Figure 4

This piece is from a series I made using a vintage anatomy book and 1950s ladies magazines.

Scrappy Show - (3 Self Portraits)

Radio Museum

hourglass museum

Earlier in the year a lovely little book of poetry by Kelli Russell Agodon came out, featuring one of my older collages as cover art -- One Woman Frightened by Max Ernst's Nightingale -- quite a thrill!

... Lizard Eruption ...

“As She Watched the Lizard Eruption,
Hilde Wished She Had Tucked a Small Handgun Into Her Pocket”
A collaboration (2014) between Lynn and me

Theme of the Week - MUSEUMS AND ART GALLERIES

I think we may have had this theme or something similar before but hopefully will inspire again this time round. Have fun!

Shopping Drama

The lady in red is Cyd Charisse, part of a still from the movie "Party Girl" from 1958.

A Notion Of Shopkeepers

Shopping This Year...

things for sale on black friday

With white acrylic paint on the background. For what it's worth, I think this one looks a lot better if you click for the larger version.

And I can't resist showing y'all a recent picture of my toddlers. That's Nénu (the female) on the top, Oscar on the bottom. I like this photo because it shows the funny little spots in two rows on Oscar's belly. Bob and I get such a kick out of those spots! =smile= We call them toddlers because at seven and a half months of age, they're big enough to create a lot of havoc, but too young to have learned all the rules. And they're a lot of work to keep up with! =laugh=

Oxfam Shop

Another from the archive.

Shoplifters OF The World Unite

I've been busy with other projects this weekend so here's one from the archive.

A Nation Of Shopkeepers

Shoe Sale At Saks

Theme of the Week - Shopping Spree

It's Black Friday and Xmas looming. All things consumerist ( is that even a word?) and shop related. Have fun!

Stranded April 1831

'shrooms party like it's 1967

It's been a difficult week for me, y'all, so I didn't have a chance to make a collage specifically for this theme. But I did make a collage for another theme: mushrooms! So I'm sneakin' this one in on the grounds that there's a number in the title and that there's a 3 to the left of the naked bottom in the upper left. And there are probably other numbers scattered through: they're just impossible to read.

The story behind this is that the other species of mushrooms were envious of Psilocybe getting to have all the fun of being the psychedelic mushroom, so they decided to have a big San-Francisco-in-1967 party and wear all their best psychedelic duds. The morels weren't invited, but they crashed the party anyway.

All the psychedelic art is from posters for Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, circa 1967.

The Numerology Lesson

Bathsheba Had a Good Figure, But She Didn't Have a Head for Them

That's "Bathsheba with King David's Letter", 1654 by Rembrandt.  The columns of figures are from a piece of paper found in a book purchased in a "thrift or charity" shop.  The corner of a US 2 dollar bill is the real thing...I was walking my dog yesterday and I found 1/4 of a $2 bill on the ground.  We walked around for quite a while looking for the other part(s) of it but never did so I thought I would include it in this collage.

Fig. 4