Listening to the Paper

Light Unlimited, 2010
Gel transfer on paper

I love to collage with scrapbooking papers. They're delicious confections of color and line. Cheap, too—on sale, a handful of small change will buy a big 12 x 12 sheet. Admittedly, scrapbooking papers can be a bit of a challenge to work with, especially when those papers have forceful patterns. But even neutral scrapbooking papers pose design risks. Every paper—indeed every art material—has its own place in the vast continuum of visual meaning, and just because a paper is beige with a muted vintage-looking script doesn't mean it will not assert itself, sometimes in aggravating ways, in your piece of work.

Man of the House, 2010
Acetone & gel transfers/paper

One way to make the paper behave—and a popular trend in recent mixed-media publications—is to tone it down with a slap of paint. For those who prefer to let their work evolve spontaneously, this treatment takes away much of the risk of the paper overwhelming the work.

It also takes away much of the spirit of the paper.  

Two Medicine Lake, 2010
Tape transfer/old postcard/paper

A different approach is to forgo that coat of paint in favor of hosting—before gluing—a heart-to-heart talk between the piece you want to make and the paper you're thinking of using. Put it all on the table! Proportion, directionality, balance, tension, composition, and more, if you can think of it! What does the paper offer to your idea? How can you best harness its aesthetic to serve your concept? If there's a balance to strike, where exactly is it?

Who knows what will happen if you let the paper speak.

The Textures of Loneliness

Brave Red Boat, 2011

A lone man in a boat facing landward. On the bow trim, a "five" and a "five," but a ripped medallion in the center shows that two fives don't add up to a perfect ten. Nor will they ever again. I created this piece out of overpowering empathy for my father, a commercial fisherman, who has recently lost his co-pilot of over 60 years, my mother, in a fashion that was as accidental as it was tragic. When I was building the layers of papers and ink in this piece to create depth and texture, I was speaking to the passage of time and the layers of memory that both deplete and enrich us as our losses begin to accumulate. In hand collage, it's a trick to add stuff on top of more stuff without the piece becoming about the stuff, the message obscured. I don't always get it right, but this time I feel that I walked the line.

The materials and techniques I used in this piece are simple. This seemed fitting. My mother and father were children of the Great Depression, and they embraced simplicity in all aspects of their lives even in prosperous times. My Dad's grief is profound but simple in its intensity. Not for him the psychology of steps of grieving. To create the various layers, I started with paper--text from a 1936 postage stamp collector's guide from the library's free shelf and assorted other vintage publications. And an old photo, from which I made a transparency by laying on coat after thin coat of an acrylic gel medium. Yes, I sat at my worktable and watched each coat dry. Then came dye inks the colors of silk saris to hint at the strange, the other, the mystery of the passage from life. I finished up with some glazes I concocted from cheap acrylic paints. My mother would have admired my frugality.

With love and time and kindness and understanding, I hope the man in the boat will be able to reverse his land-locked course and set sail on his beloved high seas again.