Love is a Battlefield

I was so excited last week; we were finally going to work on boxes in collage class! But all week long I couldn’t think of what to do! I was so demoralized–this was the reason why I wanted to take the class! In the end, I loaded up my bags full of whatever I could find, grabbed the smallest of the cigar boxes I had lying around and headed to class only with the vaguest notion that I wanted to do something with gold wedding bands and making them look like chain mail.

Well, the result was somewhat surprising. The inside is a warm, inviting tableau with roses and a deep, rich purple color. The outside is wedding band-chain mail and .38 special shell casings.  I’d like to be able to say that this represents a tough attitude outside, protecting a soft interior, but I think it is actually more reflective of the idea that love is a battlefield. Sigh.

Since last week when I shot this, I have cleaned up the purple edges with some paint so it doesn’t look so sloppy.

Till I Loved, I Never Lived Enough

The second week of collage class, the aim was to experiment with using “bleeding” tissue (I might be tempted to refer to it as “tissue with fugitive color,” but that may be technically incorrect). So  I made the tissue bleed and I tried using the bleeding tissue to sponge the board, and I created tie-dye-like strips of tissue and generally had a ball making a complete and utter mess of both my board and my poor fingers. Seriously, if you ever work with “bleeding” tissue, wear gloves or be ridiculed for your multi-hued fingers for the following days.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge fan of tissue paper for artwork purposes, so I through in some other stuff, too, a piece of rice paper with a beautiful Chinese character printed on gold and some candy wrappers with little love sayings: “Dare to love completely” courtesy of Dove Dark Promises, and “Till I loved, I never lived enough” courtesy of Bacci. Then for good measure and to keep with the theme that was emerging, I threw in parts of an old unsent love letter to my first love. This fit nicely with the Chinese character, too, because our one and only kiss was in Shanghai on a summer night.