A Spaghetti Western

This could be 'A Headful of Spaghetti'
                  or 'The Good the Bad and the Cat'

Things Every Man Should Have

(I'm stealing technique from W...)

Arborists

Never to young to learn to plant a tree!

Treatment For Shock

An Important Don't For Mothers

Time Machine

Lilliputians

Anthropology

Swan Dive

year of the horse

I made this last year for the Year of the Horse. Apologies if you've already seen it: I just can't remember whether I posted it here or not.

Photos of horses in motion all by Eadweard Muybridge. Still photos by Keith Carter.

Muybridge, who did most of his work in the 1870s-80s, was a real pioneer: his documentation of animals & humans in motion is influential to this day. One issue he resolved has to do with the horse's gallop: Muybridge was frustrated with centuries of depictions of galloping horses with their front legs extended out front & up high, and their back legs extended out back & up high. He didn't think that posture ever happens in the gallop, and he proved it. He found that there is indeed a moment in the gallop when all four of the horse's feet are off the ground, but it happens when their legs are gathered underneath them. If you look at the second row from the top, the second photo from the left shows that moment.

theme: black & white

'Seems like it's time for a fairly themeless theme: any collage at all, so long as it's black & white.

Map Reading

Homage to Cartographers

The page that I've pasted down on is from a book called "The Age of Exploration".  Hand with tube of paint from a vintage art magazine ad.  Bit of an antique map oozing out of tube.  Don't remember who that dude holding the globe is but a ruler and pen are in his hands and he looks like a cartographer to me.

due cani

"Due cani" means "two dogs" in Italian. The silhouettes of the chihuahua (left) and Great Dane (right) were lifted from a single photograph that ran in National Geographic. The maps that make up the two dogs and their background are both from roughly the same area in central Italy. I don't know what country the border map came from.  

Rear Bend Bowling

Love Map

Arka-Noe

like leaves on a muddy stream

The foreground layer contains art that is cartographic but abstract: it does not correspond to anything in the real world. There's a reproduction, in puzzle pieces, of a drawing with felt-tip marker—brown & red on cream paper—by a mysterious outsider artist known only as "Michael." Also in that layer are some details—black & white squares—from an acrylic painting by Guillermo Kuitca.

The background layer was an experiment. I printed a bunch of maps of all different types (roads, cities, topo, geologic, hand-drawn, & so on), about 25 in all, on clear sticky paper and layered them on top of each other.  I figured it would turn out dark and muddy.... and so it did. =laugh=

Some Old Mail Art

Postcard Shop

One from the archive.

Just Remind Yourself

Heinrich Huber takes a flight home

Angel of Travel

One from the archives.  I had to have a re-excision of a suspicious mole on my ankle and have been spending a lot of time elevating that leg.  So...here is an oldie (back when I was rubber stamping and pasting on vintage book covers.)  Also a time when I was adding butterfly wings to figures...a tip of the hat to Somerset Studio which I used to subscribe to!

Weather Station

By the way...

....next week, the 29th, will be the last Thursday in January. I would like to continue doing themes through the month of February, then hand off the baton for March. Does anyone have any objections to that? Who volunteers to start doing themes on March 5th?

Fi

brainy islamic women

From my archives. All my uses of maps so far were to make the map a background. I'm ready to try something different. Are you?

theme: maps

Whether you're imagining a trip you'd like to take, or a nightmare trip, or just grabbing a piece of map for its visual appeal... put a map on it—or more than one map. Any kind of map will do: geographic, topographic, scientific, hand-drawn, something connecting the other elements in your collage as though they are places, or a place you made up... go for it!

multicolor blobs, with and without spikes

Getting this in at the last minute, right before I announce the new theme. I had the flu. Don't get the flu!

Captured Blobs

Blob Fashion

Blob Song

On a musical note, one of Burt Bacharach's earliest hits was the song for the 1958 movie The Blob which starred a young Steve McQueen in his first leading role.

Music & Lyrics by Bacharach/Hal David/Mac David

Recorded by The Five Blobs

"Beware of the blob, it creeps
And leaps and glides and slides
Across the floor
Right through the door
And all around the wall
A splotch, a blotch
Be careful of the blob"

Here Comes The Blob !!!

'Total Blobsense!!'

Blob Invasion!

Surreal Seurat

What fun this was to put together this morning!  Great theme Fi.  That's "Bathers at Asnieres" 1884 by Georges Seurat.  I used two paintings for the blobs.  "Coalbrookdale by Night" 1801 by Philip James DeLoutherbourg and "Attila and His Hordes Overrun Italy and the Arts" 1843-47 by Eugene Ferdinand Victor.

How About a Cosmic Blob?

Maybe she's sunbathing on the Hubble Telescope...

Captain Flu

Capatin Flu battles the blobby germs and viruses! From the archive.

light blue surreal

From my archives. The cosmetics on the driveway are from a painting by Wayne Thiebaud. I don't remember where the blob came from.

theme: blob(s)

From orderly arrays to disorderly blobs... I'm talkin' 'bout the third meaning of "blob" in my dictionary: "an object, especially a large one, having no distinct shape or definition." It doesn't have to be large: just an amorphous blob of nothin' much, a little window into the chaos that haunts us all the time, whether we know it's there or not. You can make the blob yourself, or you can cut a blob out of whatever. If you say it's a blob, it's a blob. And there's no limit on how many blobs you can put in your collage; nor is there a requirement for something other than a blob in what you create. Hail Eris!

HAP 11. mis kees

An array in color ... I'm hooked.
I didn't do a lot of thinking here, just grabbed some images that looked like they could belong together..
I have a lot of old children's books, some of them dated 1939.

when all the ice melts...

...Fire 'Zilla will emerge from the depths of the sea. But will he come to rescue us, or to escort us to our well-deserved doom?

Fire 'Zilla from photo by Patti Sundstrom. Views of the ocean's surface from photo by Richard Ellis.

I don't know why I picked this topic. I'm really lousy at getting things to line up right. The next one will be easier, I promise you.

Quite an Array!

Had fun going through scraps and things to conjure up three different arrays (each has six images).  Although not quite as "pop" as Peter Blake's work, I did put a few cultural references within the pieces.

Victorian Twister

An array in black and white

I am a bit confused about an array and a grid, but I think the difference is that a grid can be an array but an array doesn't have to be a grid?

An Array With A Man In The Way

From the archive.

I Say...Array.

aleatory: fire water leaf01 leaf02

This 4 x 9 array is from my archives—my first experiment in using chance to make an artwork. ("Aleatory" roughly means "by chance.") Since there were four possible choices, I flipped a coin twice for each location to determine what went into it.

Enigma Machine

Scrappy's Curio Cabinet

A Little Museum For Hazel Jones

Another "little museum" Peter Blake homage for my darling wife. 2014.

Receipts

I´m not sure if I understood the theme properly because I did not know what arrays mean - but at least Angie´s link  as well as Fi´s links and the two posted collages gave me an idea.

The receipts are from my bookmark collection, combined with hands, technical itmes and old price tags. I created all in all 22 of them in December last year for an artist magazine called  "Excavations Magazine" by Svenja Wahl. For Fi´s KK-theme I´ve chosen 9 of them to make an array of receipts. Hope I can create another one this week!

A Small Museum For John Evans

One of several "small museums" I have made in the style of Sir Peter Blake - one of my all time collage heroes. This accumulation aquired from Leslie Caldera who was given a whole stash of collage bits and ephemera from the archives of John Evans by his wife.