Common Ground

This piece is about how women communicate. I got the idea from a radio program, a Women-in-Business piece, that made the point that, when negotiating in the workplace, men tend to list their achievements first while women tend to try to find common ground first. With or without the workplace, I think women do attempt to find connection through a language of experience. And so this piece was born. Common Ground.

When I was putting this piece together in my head, I knew I wanted a sort of haze of words, to express communication, around the women. But I didn't want most of those words to be readable--in fact, I wanted just the opposite. I was looking to express the symbology of language, the searching for common ground, as it were.

"Common Ground," paper decollage, 8x10 on canvas board

There are probably lots of ways to achieve this, but I chose to make in-place gel transfers by embedding the text within layers of paper and then practicing the art of decollage. When I say "decollage," what I really mean is rubbing off various paper layers with water (sometimes spit) after the gel has dried. This is a good technique for the patient artist, as the papers can take a long time to dry if they're layered thickly, as these are, and it can take forever to rub down to the sections that you want to expose. Which means you have to put down the work and come up for air every now and then. It is far too easy to get into a State of Meditative Rubbing and wipe out your concept while your are singing the harmony to the songs on your playlist.

I used a bunch of interesting papers here, and the shame is that you can't see most of them. For instance, I used, as a base layer, paper from Progressive Tailor Magazine (1926), but you can see only a bit of the men's trouser pattern at top right. More visible are the pages from the Speedwriting Shorthand Dictionary (1923). These are the words, dots, and squiggles that surround the ladies. Why are the words reversed, you might ask. I would answer "remember that the ink on the page is embedded in the gel beneath it so, when you rub off the paper on top, you are left with the reverse image."

Other interesting papers used in this composition come from Ideal Fairy Tales (1897), A Field Guide to Nests, Eggs, and Nestlings of North American Birds (1978), and Irving Berlin sheet music (top left corner). Everything goes better with music, wouldn't you say?

As always, thanks for reading.

Big Blue Moon

Gel transfers are so much softer than tape and acetate transfers, and sometimes that softness is just right. Acetate transfers were all the rage a while back, and I know you can burn the edges of acetate and underpaint it for goulish effects and roll it up into Christmas ornaments and such. And nothing beats a packing tape transfer for adding gray tones to the work (not to mention the joy of upcycling such a commonplace material).

But I find myself, these days, returning to the humble (albeit labor-intensive) gel transfer for pure workability. In particular, there are no hard edges to figure out how to hide. Which can be a Big Thing. You know, you have something to say, and you want to say it, to flat-out-work-to-express that "something"  to the best of your ability. Everything you know about various techniques cooks in the background (and I hasten to add that I love learning new techniques), but at the end of the day, it's not really about the techniques, is it?

Here's one of my recent collages that incorporates a gel transfer. That would be the lady, whose skin you can see through to the paper beneath. It's easy to lose count of the number of coats it takes for me to do a transfer (because there's so much drying time in between the multiple thin coats of the gel medium), but it's safe to say this one took at least half-a-dozen.

Big Blue Moon, 5 x 7 paper collage with mixed media. Laura Tringali Holmes, 2012

The photo is one from my personal collection. No idea who this lady is--I pulled her from a sun-scorched box at a flea market, and I'm delighted that I can keep her spirit alive in my work. The background paper is from a book of manners for French jeunes fille published in the 1800s. The moon is cut from handmade paper that has blue-next-to-green, my favorite color combination. The little text strip at the bottom is from a New York plantsman's catalog, also from the 1800s.

What you can't see is the sound that filled my ears while I was constructing this piece (in my loft, I typically work to a lovingly constructed iPod playlist, simply called "Collage"). Cheers in particular to Joni Mitchell's "Night Ride Home," and this lyric in particular:

Once in a while
In a big blue moon
There comes a night like this
Like some surrealist
Invented this 4th of July

 
As always, thanks for tuning in.

Going Metal

I am taken with tin. And of course altering playing cards remains dear to my heart. As is paper, the older the better. So I've been combining my loves and this is what's been happening in my neck of the woods.

I call this one "Shiny Shoes and Epaulets." It's made from a piece of coffee tin, text from an 1889  copy of Harper's Monthly Magazine, metal fasteners, and a few spatters of acrylic paint, all grounded on a playing card.

This one is "She Who Masks Last Masks Best." The (rusted) ceiling tin bird is masked with a bit of Colorado license plate, and there's that paper from the 1889 Harpers Monthly again. A reproduction playing card from the Second Word War serves as the base.

Those sharp little offcuts that fly off my tin snips are beastly to clean up--and pose a real safety issue to my under-table pooch--so I've become best friends with a Dustbuster. What we do for our dogs!