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

Front End Loading

 

These are a few playing cards that I've recently altered for collaboration with other collage artists.

When you're on the front end of a collaboration, as I am here, the challenge is to choose images and colors that hint and suggest...and then to stop with the cutting and pasting before you spill the beans on the whole story. 

For somebody like me, who likes nothing better than to sit in a pile of paper scraps and play out a story to the nth degree, this is a lot harder than it sounds.

How will the receiving artists respond to my prompts? That's always the magical part, made even more wondrous by the intimate scale of a playing card.

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!

Longitudes and Lattitudes

Eight playing cards for collaboration flew into my life about four months ago. I was drawn to the variety of birds on the playing cards—avian creatures ranging from eagles and egrets to chickadees. Even the humble junco had a place! But I think it was this very diversity that, in the end, threw me. If the cards had contained a bunch of iconic Big Black Birds I would have run with the symbology. I love Big Black Birds. But real birds? The type I watch in the pond and at the feeders and everywhere I travel? Nope. The feeling was strong that I needed to honor these guys. I wanted to unify the set of cards to reflect my thoughts about the birds I so love. But how? Enter paralysis. And so I perched on the cards for about four months, with nothing feeling right.

And then I was lucky enough to spend a half-day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was there for other exhibits, but one of the last things I managed to squeeze in was the Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz show for no other reason than that my companion is interested in all things photographic. The images that I saw unmoored me, carried me off to someplace with different longitudes and lattitudes. I was reminded yet again that when we give ourselves opportunity to look at viewpoints other than the ones we are used to every day, we give ourselves the freedom to change perspective.

And thus the Birdwatcher series was born. Here are a few samples from the set of eight cards.

Birdwatcher #4, Laura Tringali Holmes & Liz Cohn, December 2011
Paper on paper on playing card with mixed media

"Birdwatcher #7," Laura Tringali Holmes & Liz Cohn, December 2011
Paper on paper on playing card with mixed media

"Birdwatcher #1," Laura Tringali Holmes & Liz Cohn, December 2011
Paper on paper on playing card with mixed media

This set of cards will be part of a travelling exhibition created by Liz Cohn called “Playing With (more than) a Full Deck." The show's first stopover is February 2 at the Cannon Beach Gallery in Cannon Beach, Oregon. From there it moves to Portland. At last count, there are over 1200 tiny collaborative works of art featuring over 150 artists.

It was a close call, but I'm so glad that these eight cards will make it in time.

Thanks for listening.

Pushing It

"Perfect 10," hand collage on playing card, Laura Tringali Holmes, 2011

When I decided to stop coloring my hair, my hair cutter advised a buzz cut, overdying, and a head-wrapping scarf to shield the world from my transition--in that order. I wasn't buying it, not one single bit. Eventually, after a bunch of back-and-forths, my hair cutter moved off polar opposite. We agreed to face the transition of brown to silver with flexibility and with the heart of a Columbus or Champlain. Ball in her court.

We didn't talk about it, but all of a sudden, a few layers were cut into my long hair--for "movement," my hair-cutter's theory being that movement was as good a disguise of transitioning as any.

A few weeks later, more layers, more "movement." I noticed that I could swing my hair to good effect. In motion, there is a beauty lacking in the static. I felt like a well-groomed collie. Silver on top, brown at the tips. I was surprised. My hair cutter smirked, like she had known the answer all along.

This, the woman who was one step short of draping me in a burka, to protect the eyes of society from poor, growing-out-of-hair-dye me.

Upon reflection, I realize that from the scarf to  the scissor artistry, this is a lesson in how we grow.

Suppose I had caved to the pressure of the scarf? Suppose my hair cutter had stuck to her preconceptions?

When we rise to challenges, we find stuff that we didn't even know we had. My hair cutter lifted her scissors in honor of the challenge. I rose to the challenge of letting her rise to the challenge.

In the continuum of life and experience, I realize that what bothers me when reading about other scissoring endeavors, such as "collage made easy," and that there are "no mistakes in collage," and that collage is a good way to "use up your leftovers," is the lack of progress upward.  

The easy way out would have put me in a scarf, or a buzz cut, or even more hair dye.

Why push for that when the options are so much more expansive?

As always, thanks for listening.

Slapdash Courage

I am by nature precise. In this age of frenetic spontaneity, I still sweat the details. In the little collage below, for example, the placement of that man's foot is not accidental. Nor is the placement of his hip. In the design of this piece, I was shooting to express the contrast of lift versus drag, to achieve a visual expression of the feeling of ascension that can come when listening to music that engages, charms, and uplifts.

“Man with Vim,” acetate photo transparency on playing card, old text,

sheet music, October 2011

So what's going on with the seemingly imprecise placement of that first line of text on the collage below? The heart can be a strong dictator. While my intellect was pushing for symmetrical placement, my heart was egging on my glue brush in its act of slapdash courage. Its argument? A placement of text blocks that oozed uncertainty would express the difficulty inherent in choosing to act with the courage of one's convictions. A difficult design decision to express difficult emotions.

“Woman with Fig Leaf,” acetate photo transparency on playing card,

old text, October 2011

As always, thanks for listening.

Altered Playing Cards II

"Seeing, Hearing," 8-2011

I've been fooling around with ways to better integrate the face markings of the playing cards with what I'm trying to say with the designs. These cards are some examples of where I'm going. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for listening.

"In Spades," 8-2011

"Lavender," 8-2011

"The Young Women," 8-2011

"Critical Mass," 8-2011

Letting It Rip

It was only this past May that I let myself rip. Literally.
I owe this movement forward to a series of conversations with a painter who also works in the Rare Book Room of The Strand in New York City.

This is a picture of The Strand, taken in May. The Strand has 18 miles of books and is located at the corner of 12^th and Broadway in New York City.

Here is my favorite shelf in The Strand. In the Rare Book Room, there is a section just for well-worn books, called Breakers because...well...the books are broken.

And here is my purchase from that day, an 1837 copy of Journal des Demoiselles.

You can see that the book comes with pull-out patterns. There are many of them interspersed throughout the book.

With a book as special to me as this one, prior to May of this year I would have waited for a rainy day, donned my barge-mule hat, and tediously scanned the texts and images that I could see myself using in future works of collage. Out of respect for old books, for the sake of preservation but also as a charm against messups--to put it bluntly, scanner as garlic-bulb necklace.

Enter my painter friend and the aforementioned conversations.

And now I rip.

Here are some altered playing cards in the prep stage, using text snips from Journal des Demoiselles, coated with a wash or two of raw sienna glaze.

I might rip small, but it's a big deal for me. Even though most of the text will probably be covered up as the collages are completed, I will know that the original bits and pieces are under there, and that history goes forward.

Here's a finished altered playing card using Journal des Demoiselles text. The check used at the bottom of the card is also from the original--it would seem that nothing of the paper persuasion is safe from me now.

"Dog Lover," using image transfer from a photo courtesy of the collection of Mrs. Inman