Collage Fragments Deconstructed

At first glance, this collage might seem like it's about as much fun to view as it is to trek a pilgrimage through desert sands. Barefoot. On one's knees.



"The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward," paper collage
with décollage, Laura Tringali Holmes 2013

Yes, there is the anxious-looking child, supporting her chin with her hand, as swaths of thought patterns rendered in language symbols cut through her head. Not to mention the maps of places unvisited serving as background.

Like I said, burning desert sands.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." The wafting misty mirror writing
 is achieved through gel transfer, in this case from paper taken from the Speedwriting
Shorthand Dictionary (1923). When you want a wafting look, there's nothing better,
in my humble opinion, than gel transfer combined with décollage. All the words
here begin with the letter C, and, yes, the word "coffin" is in there somewhere. 

And then there is that guy. Let's call him the father figure. What is he lifting? Could it be a child-sized coffin? Is the girl's integrity as a human being and her value inside? Is that why she looks so anxious? Is the guy about to come at her with a big fat belt?  Is that why all that language/thought stuff is afloat?

Like I said, barefoot and on your knees.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." And, no,
it's not a coffin, just a tabletop being muscled onto its legs, from
a volume in the voluminous 1960s Practical Handyman encyclopedia.

But wait. There's more. C'mon down, Emily Dickinson, and bring your wonderfully poetic lines: "Hope is the thing with feathers...that perches in the soul." I invite you, dear readers, to note the direction of our girl's eyes.

Why...it would seem she's locked onto The Thing With Feathers! Not her father, or whatever it is he happens to be holding.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." Okay, so the gaze isn't
perfectly aligned, but we collage artists do what we can with what we have.
And if you've been following this blog, you know that this girl has had her hopeful
work cut out for her, so we're going to give her a round of applause anyway.

And, for an even more potent portent, we have what I am, for the purposes of this blog entry, calling a "flourishing target." Do you know about my Target Practice Project? No? I won't trouble you with a nosebleed about the Project right now, but I do encourage you to learn about it and to enjoy the work of some 150 artists, who have generated over 300 images based on a single 1960s Sears Roebuck archery target, at these links:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/161991817319872/
http://thetargetpracticeproject.blogspot.com/

I have used a fragment of that same target here, but in this case, drilling down right here and right now, we can see that the plain paper target has taken on, through the magic of collage and the ink that lives on paper, evidence of fecundity. Wow. The plot gets thickerer and thickerer.

Detail, "The Memory of Coffin Spelled Backward." This shows the target, to which
I have added, through ink transfer from an old magazine page, tree trunks and
flourishing foliage. Hope is the thing with feathers, but hope is in nature, too.

So let's look at the collage again, shall we? And let's cast a weather eye toward the hope that is embedded, albeit subtly, because we survivors of narcissistic parents have certainly had plenty of opportunity to hone our survival chops (albeit subtly).

The point of all this being that once we can look at our memories, and realize that they ARE memories and not predictors of our futures...well...

...we are then on our way, aren't we?

Thank you, again, for listening. I am thankful, on this Thanksgiving weekend, that you are out there listening.



A Day of Eggcess

I was surprised that my old paints and glazes hadn't dried in their bottles. It's been that long since I've layered anything but paper and glue.

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!

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.

Blind Perfectionist

"Blind Perfectionist," Laura Tringali Holmes 2012
---
Paper collage with décollage and in-place acrylic-gel transfers on 8 x 10 canvas board
with pencil and marker
 Papers: 1930s sales receipt; 1923 Speedwriting Shortland Dictionary; 1978 A Field Guide  to the Nests,
Eggs, and Nestlings of North American Birds; Irving Berlin Songbook; other papers 1800s - 1980s.
 

Many moons ago I was quite the perfectionist, but no more. Perfectionism is a righteous place in which to dwell. It's so utterly morally unshakeable. So judgmental. So paralyzing in its detail. So...blinding.

I changed up my ways thanks to an online housekeeping column, written by Marla Cilley, which I started to read when I sunk to the bottom of the barrel of overwhelment by the act of single-mothering three children.

Marla's advice was that it was better to take a lick at a snake than to sit there in paralysis and allow oneself to be bitten.

This piece is about taking a lick at the snake, and about the smoke and mirrors of the details of perfectionism.

Hope you enjoy. And thanks, as always, for listening.

p.s. In case you don't follow regularly, the "how to make a gel transfer" tutorial appears a few blogs ago, here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-to-make-gel-transfer.html

Update September 5, 2012:

This collage, "Blind Perfectionist," was given a Daily Deviation Award on 9-5-2012 at the site where I keep my gallery (http://lauratringaliholmes.deviantart.com/). I've received a slew of favorable comments, including some from artists who typically don't much like collage. I feel great about the approval, but also great about turning people on to the boundlessly expressive medium that is collage.

This is what the site says about the Daily Deviation choice process:

"The Daily Deviation is a daily feature chosen from the galleries here on deviantART. A small assortment of submissions are chosen each day by a select group of staff/volunteer members who wish to showcase an image which they found impressive or otherwise interesting enough to deserve being brought to the attention of the community-at-large."

I am honored by the recognition and deeply grateful.

 

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.