Sometimes: Self-Portrait

The third week of collage class was self-portrait night. I’m a big journalizer and personal essayist, so I prepped my board by writing all over it and included transparencies made from drawings in a journal from my travels throughout Europe a few years ago. I have some wonderful rice paper with Japanese writing on it so I used strips of that and also used that to make one of my ubiquitous paper cranes. I used newspaper and imprints from newspapers to keep on with the writing theme and then tried to give it all a little more depth by adding some color with both transparent rice paper and more of the blotting and sponging techniques from the week before using bleeding tissue. The text of the background is as follows:

Sometimes I get lost on my way across town and I’m no longer at 14th and Olympic but on 23rd Street headed east across town back to between 1st Avenue and the River or I’m on McLaughlin about to turn up Holgate, but in either case I am headed towards homes that are no longer mine instead of to the restaurant or whatever place of business I am actually on my way to. I get lost and then I miss my turn and I swear a little under my breath but not like I did that one time on the FDR Drive when sweet little me shocked everyone else in the van with my profanity. And by kissing James. James with the long braid down his back and then the shaved head, with the piercings and that funny laugh. I told him I would love him forever and I meant it and I do. I love them all, carry them around with me in my heart and they jingle together in there like change in a pocket only I never lose them, the little fragments of my life and theirs intertwining, lacing and unlacing and sometimes breaking apart but scattered all throughout my consciousness like the little scraps of paper that line my walls and carpet my floor and are the fabric of my life, weaving together my thoughts, hopes, loves and ambitions. I can remember who I was and by extension who I am today when I read the words “Fun with Tesla Coils” on a post-it or see a ticket stub for Nightngale and remember how I ran home that night inspired and overjoyed and wrote to Lynn Redgrave that I too would start to live now, that I too would soar. And she believed me.

2008

Geography

Years ago back in Mme Lanier’s art class, we had to do collage. I searched through the magazines provided for this purpose and carefully selected four images that caught my eye but that had nothing to do with one another whatsoever. Even at the age of eight I remember looking at my shellacked block of wood, images permanently affixed, my head tilted and my face scowling. It was amazing to me how four images that I found individually so beautiful could look so wrong together.

A few weeks ago, spurred on by my current obsession with Joseph Cornell, encaustic collage and assemblages, I started a class in collage at the local community college. My one goal for that first night was to create something better than my disaster from Mme Lanier’s class. Seriously, that was my only goal. I think I managed to at least accomplish that.

This time I decided to try to stick to the more muted colors that I tend to favor, browns and neutrals with only a splash of color here and there. I hunted down maps and flower images and used paper cranes because I use them in everything. But my favorite touch in this piece is easily overlooked. I had doodled on a fast-food restaurant napkin–filling in the dots on the napkin in a heart-shaped pattern and then adding flower drawings of my own. It’s in the lower right corner of the photo. Once the napkin had been glued down, the paper of the napkin virtually disappeared, leaving only my ballpoint pen markings. I’ll definitely have to play around with that technique more in the future.

Pie

This card is actually a study for a larger collage I am still intending to make. I learned my lesson with the card about broken pieces of wire and white glue, however; I should have realized that anything water-based would make the metal rust! Anyway, I think it was around Thanksgiving time and I was thinking about the taboos surrounding the last piece of what-have-you and got it in my head that it might be sort of sweet to express that even hell would be endurable if you were with that special someone. It’s a leap to go from pie to eternal damnation, I know, but sometimes that’s just how it is. 2007