Don't Get Jittery On Me--Part 10, or "Natures Mortes"

And this is the end of my most recent altered book. Thank you for enduring the previous nine entries. Rest assured that after this post, I will no longer trouble you on this topic.

But there is something you need to know. Something that I know.

You might not see it at first, but if you look closely enough at anything living, even while it's in that blissful state of seeming perfection, there's usually evidence of something booking quick to that line between ripe and rotten--natures mortes.

This used to bother me. In fact, for the longest time, while otherwise enjoying the seminal Dutch still life paintings in particular, I'd avert my eyes at the blemish on the otherwise perfect pear skin, the wilting petal summarily dropped to the table from the otherwise fulsome peony.

But if you live long enough, your perspective has to change. Stasis is a joke. I turned 61 a few days ago. That's sixty-one. That casts a bit of a different shade on the fine line between ripe and rotten and the appreciation thereof. 

And so, while enjoying the last of Don't Get Jittery On Me, you might get the feeling that happy endings exist within a continuum larger than black and white. That's as it should be. Life is so much more complex, and so much more beautiful, than that, and we as a society really do need to talk about that.

But back to the book:

We left our heroine here at last reading, contemplating empty lawn chairs,
contemplating repose.



We turn the page...and encounter a concealed trifold. You'll see this open in the next photo.
If you've been following the evolution of this altered book, you might remember the image on the
right. Yup, she's now officially a motif. Here she dispenses advice in the same way she did in the
initial pages. "Stay a while. Complete the thought?" she asks the reader. The bookmark, an
altered playing card, presents an alternate view.

The trifold. Transparencies abound, but what is life but seeking transparency?
The text snips are really important here. I appreciate images. I appreciate words.
Most of all, I appreciate words riding shotgun with images.
 

A detail. There are symbolic references galore here to my life.
I won't bore you with that. But I will show you the lift-up flap...
 

After lifting, this is what you see. I love the exclamation point.
That snip comes from the liner notes of some pretty old vinyl.
 

"She kept herself company." Another detail of the trifold. A seemingly innocent statement,
note that there is an image, and then the same image, reversed, atop, which creates
a grouping of four from a photo of two. I'm not implying the need for multiple
personalities, simply that sometimes resiliency--and self-reliance--carry the day.
 

The next spread features birds (no surprise there) and, gasp, an Older Woman.
A viewfinder circle points out the bird brooch at the woman's throat. There's
a pink pig with wings. There's text. There are holes punched along a bifold
(on the right) Someday I'll thread them with ribbon or whatever. For now I'm
liking the negative space. (For the bird-impaired, at right you're looking at
a red-bellied woodpecker and a rufous hummingbird.)

A detail. I must say, I love that she's wearing a bird brooch. This page is composed of a photo,
collaged  papers, acetate transparencies, and a bit of metal to hold all the layers together.
I'm never complacent about the number of  repurposed things that can come together under
 my hands.

 

Geez, this is complicated. Apologies. The bifold on the right opens, and this
is what you see. Note the shadow bird on the left side of the bifold (a hawk), and
how it transforms into a dove on the right side of the bifold. There are lots
of men birds in the center, looking in all sorts of directions. Remember, this book
has as its theme recovery from being raised in a family with a narcissistic parent.
 

Turning the page, there's our heroine. And she's dancing! I devised a way to
get her to lift off the page at certain points to increase the feeling of motion.
On the right is a catchall pocket thing, with an altered playing card thanking...
people...with a vintage text strip. One of the things I like about recycling old
words is that...sometimes...it's easier than pulling them up from the heart.
 

Which brings us back to a snapshot of the opening spread. If there's one thing I have learned,
it's the beauty of circularity. This page shows the dedication. This book is for one of my three
children, Emma. Other projects have been and are dedicated to my other two children, Pete and Eva.
My children are individuals and I revel in their individuality.

Whew. And that is it for Don't Get Jittery On Me, an altered book, a labor of love created with painstaking detail and quite a few emotional twists and turns over more months than I can count. I leave you, dear reader, with some sadness, as is to be expected with any project that is finally finished. And for those of you who have ploughed through this with not much idea of what I'm talking about, I urge you to dig around in the blog archives for the earlier posts, which will reveal the themes and, if you are so inclined, the how-tos. 

Whatever will I write about now? Stay tuned.

And thanks, as always, for listening.

If you've enjoyed this series, you might want to have a peek at The Target Practice Project, an international collage collaboration that I began in order to use up the piles of 1960s Sears archery targets I discovered while cleaning up my father's garage after his death. I blog about it here http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013_08_01_archive.html and here http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2014/09/one-year-later-empty-chair.html

You can get a much better sense of the scope of the Project--and marvel at the work contributed by a huge group of talented collage artists-- by popping over to the Tumbler, at http://thetargetpracticeproject.tumblr.com

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.