But for a few days now, here in the dreary Northeast, I've been awakened by the merry sounds of our own dawn chorus...which is what I call those relentlessly cheerful chirpers who flock to my feeders in the early morning hours in Spring. Spring! While Spring is certainly not official, the birds are back in town and that's all it takes for my heart to soar.
Feeling excessively cheered this morning, I wanted to made an excessive piece...well...eggcessive, actually. So I pulled out all my old mixed-media stuff and sat down...to express...buoyancy.
It started here, with a few fragments of plastic that I have used in the past as viewfinders. Today I focused my viewfinders on a feather.
I began the piece with papers and a healthy layer of eggs. And then added more paper and more eggs and then I rubbed on a little ink, and, because I can't seem to help myself these days, did just a wee bit of décollage around the chimney swift.
And then came the gesso, because I wanted to highlight some of the existing text, and to do that, I had to push the other text into the background. Gesso is known for its pushing qualities. Clearly, there was also a unity question here, and I was counting on the gesso to take down the noise of my unrestrained paper choices a decibel or three. The gesso was not as cooperative as the paints and glazes, having hardened in its bottle from lack of use, so I had to chip it out and pound it into a slurry with spritzes of water. But it reconstituted, eventually. A Spring miracle!
I turned to my old friends the paints and glazes next...beige and gold and rust and seafoam green. Not having worked with mixed media in a very long time, I used the glazes sparingly. By contrast, I also added a honking big golden paper egg--nothing "sparing" about that egg--and a text snip that, for me, became the focal point of the piece. In case you can't read it from the blurry cell phone picture, the text snip says: "...half the pleasures of the world come through my eyes. If this does not make me an expert...."
To reinforce the message in the text strip, I had no choice at this point but to add an evidentiary point, a a symbolic me, walking into the excess of eggs to prove myself an expert. (She--the me--is walking into the eggs, not away from them, I assure you. Look carefully at her shoes.) And, because this is where I happen to be now in my artistic experimentation, I had to décollage her, to reveal...her pointy head, as it turns out.
Here's a detail:
Whew! Finally, here is the finished piece. Thanks for joining me in my eggcessive journey today. And happy Spring to you!
