I haven't had much time this week to work on the second piece in the Visitor series (the bugs with drawn on heads that ended the last post). In the meantime, I decided to put up some pics of a piece more typical of my style. I finished this recently as well ... just about the time the idea for series hit me.

Pieces like this one require a shadowbox frame because I build out -- sometimes with found objects or sometimes just with the paper itself. This one is called "Clock." It has some bits and pieces that my cousin found in an old tool box and she thought I might have a use for them. I have no idea what the cork circle with wires would have been used for. The other object I imagine to have been part of a latch or lock of some kind. Overall, this piece is small -- only about 8 x 10 inches. Truth be told, I am not really satisfied with the composition of this one. I find, however, that disappointing pieces can usually teach me something if I keep them around long enough. I'm not quite sure what I don't like about the design of this one yet ...

I think the imagery/symbolism in this piece might be a little heavy handed, too. Here's what I was going for ... I like to play with the idea of the constructs of human design that we put on things that are beyond our control/understanding ... like the passing of time or the not passing of it, as the case may be. I am trying, perhaps, to remind myself that time as linear is an entirely human idea and has no real basis aside from the fact that it is the only way we can understand it.

Ok ... So here it goes ... My first posting.

Here are some pictures of my most recently finished project. Below, I'll explain how it came to be. It is called "Visitor No.1"




As you can see there is an image of a bug in this piece. It was some sort of moth, I think. This little guy (already dead) blew into my house one evening this summer. I was struck by how beautiful it was -- this little shell. I knew that I would want to work with this image. This seemed like the perfect time to figure out how to use that digital camera my sweet father gave me for Christmas last year. So, my little dead bug and I had a photo session. The shots came out like this.




The pictures came out a little digitized by the time I worked with them on the computer. I printed a bunch out with a regular ink jet color printer. My whole collection of shots was printed on regular 8.5 by 11 printer paper.

In the painting above, you'll see that I chose to use a particularly blurry one and draw on top of it -- for a bit of whimsy. The sheet of paper was affixed to the canvas before I painted and glazed over it.

I was very happy with how this project came out. It is a little more raw and unfinished than most of my stuff and I had fun with it. In any case, I think I am on to a theme. For the next bug picture, I am going to try and photographically document the process. Here we go: