Prints of Collages: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Fish, Fowl, Other?

I've never been one for prints of my collaged work. I look at the prints and it's like they have sapped some of the spirit inherent in the original work. The Collage Factor goes way down in a print. Which makes sense, given that the prints are ... well ... prints. I wonder about prints of traditional collages. Are the prints animal? Vegetable? Mineral? I'm not sure what they are. Some sort of "other," probably, but neither fish nor fowl, if you ask me. But making a big print out of a small collage, as I did recently, certainly has tire-kicked my ruminative wheels into an approximation of a gear.

I made this big print at the request of one of my daughters and her college roommates. They wanted to display it on a wall in their apartment. It works well there, actually. (Yes, I checked.) I like the image just fine big, which I knew I would, but, geez, I find so much to hem and haw about in the details. Or lack thereof. I think that this must be a Traditional Collage Thing. When viewed as a print, the details go all paunchy. The shadowlines go fugitive. Cuts that might nettle a viewer's response in real life (such as the breast scarification in this piece), look merely bland, like a good nose job in Los Angeles. The décollage? When viewing the original it's clear that some fool rubbed off her fingerprints getting that texture just so and if one is lucky, the viewer may just be drawn in enough to ask why.  But you don't even see the décollage in a print. We won't even go into the color values....

My bottom line: A print of a traditionally made collage is like listening to My Morning Jacket in monaural format.

Tool Series: #1 Pink Cuff, paper collage with décollage on 6x8 canvas board, at left. Big-ass print on right.

Notice that I  deliberately have been inserting the descriptor "traditionally made" when I speak about my work. As usual, in these sorts of ruminative matters, there are tentacles that stretch out in many directions. Not everybody works "traditionally" anymore. In the collage community currently there is intriguing discussion on the parameters that define the medium of collage as we have known it. How much paper is enough paper? Should glue be measured by the pound? Is digital collage really "collage"? I read these discussions avidly, though I can't contribute much since I have only a primitive working relationship with digital media at the moment. But I can't help wondering if at some point the way you get there becomes less important than what you speak and what you spark.

In other words, if what you have to say happens to be best expressed through paper and glue and scissors and knives and even rubbing off your fingerprints in the spirit of décollage ... and what you create speaks to hearts enough to be requested for daily living with ... what the heck does it matter if the shadowlines look like they were made with thick Micron pens?

These are initial thoughts and I apologize for the lack of sophistication. Art is a journey. More to follow. Thanks for listening.

Dirty Birds

"Dirty Bird #1," 2012. Laura Tringali Holmes. Paper collage with décollage
on 5 x 7 canvas board. Ink transfers from antique papers, mica splits, charcoal,
and beeswax finish. 

These four works form a series borne of weeks of listening to a large part of the Rufus Wainwright musical oeuvre. As you can see, my reaction to Wainwright's complex layering of sound and personal experience was a stanchless layering of paper in an attempt to construct a vignette of my own personal history. I call this series "Dirty Birds."

I relied heavily on the process of décollage to create this series. The word décollage comes from the French (décoller), meaning to unstick or take off. And that's just what I did. I layered a ton of paper. I then methodically removed most of it with my fingertips, leaving only traces of what had gone before. I used water to soften up the layers, sometimes spit, and coffee, too.

Rubbing off the new to reveal the old and vice versa. Building an intimate intersection of then and now. As Rufus Wainwright so masterfully does in his musical work.

"Dirty Bird #2," 2012. Laura Tringali Holmes. Paper collage with décollage
on 5 x 7 canvas board. Ink transfers from antique papers, mica splits, charcoal,
 and beeswax finish.

While décollage technically may be about rubbing off, for me, much of the process happens at the front end of the work, in the planning, when the ideas spark. What should survive the excavation? How best to assist the interaction of the paper layers both during the décollage process and in the finished work?

And what about color? In décollage, I have discovered, the luscious inks on antique paper will often transfer to the work even as you meticulously rub away its carrier pulp. There's a lot of controlled ink transfer going on in these pieces. This is stuff to think about in advance.

"Dirty Bird #3," 2012. Laura Tringali Holmes. Paper collage with décollage
on 5 x 7 canvas board. Ink transfers from antique papers, mica splits, charcoal,
 and beeswax finish.

While blithesome kick-up-your-heels serendipity is never to be denied, the workhorse for me in the creation of this series was care. And control. Again, a reflection of what I was hearing in my studio.

"Dirty Bird #4," 2012. Laura Tringali Holmes. Paper collage with décollage
on 5 x 7 canvas board. Ink transfers from antique papers, mica splits, charcoal, and beeswax finish.

Hope you enjoy the Dirty Birds.
---
A note to those who, like myself, care about such things: The prominent text snips in all four works come from Gloria Steinem's 1993 book, Revolution From Within, which was out the door in the library recycle pile when I happened to grab it back. Flipping idly through the pages, the book fell open to the story about Laura and the Confidence Clinic. My name is Laura. I've been working on confidence. A tip of the hat to serendipity, and there you have it.