Coming Clean

This is how it starts. You look at something that you've been keeping close because, in that particular raindrop of time, it captured something essential. For me the "essential" usually comes swaddled in memory and memory is usually accompanied by something sensory--a sight, a sound, a smell. In the case of the collage series at the heart of this recounting, my Dirty Birds series, the ambience was tuneful, as I was in the midst of a Rufus Wainwright iPod marathon. There's more, though. There was Gloria Steinem. Her 1993 book Revolution From Within had been languishing in the to-donate-to-the-library pile. What made me pick it up and flip to the spread...that had a story about a woman named Laura...who had been on a personal journey not unlike my own? Some would argue that in life there are no coincidences. I didn't argue anything. With Rufus Wainright bouncing off my studio walls and my scissors on fire, I sliced all the Laura passages out of Steinem's book.

The Dirty Birds series was born. The pieces, all four of them, have graced the entry wall in my home since 2012.

But today they entered rehab. I invite you to witness the passage. If you have been following along with this blog, you know that, as the daughter of a narcissist, I have been engaged in a journey of recovery. It has not been pleasant but it has been vital. In recovery, the emotional as well as the physical sort, things can happen so slowly that you don't really notice any changes until you find yourself carefully un-framing a series of collages because it has suddenly become imperative to redo that which was made in a state of almost unbearable pain. So there you have it.

Let's have a look, shall we?

This is the original Dirty Birds #1. You can see Steinem's Laura text is prominent, just a little above center. 

Original (2012) Dirty Birds #1.
Paper collage with décollage on 5 x 7 canvas board with direct-to-paper
 gel ink transfers,  mica splits, charcoal, and beeswax.

This is the Dirty Birds #1 redeux. The Laura text has been covered up, and the textual focus has shifted to a larger concept--the American family. I've added a number of paper scraps as well as another mica split, some dye ink for that luscious blue, some chalk for sheen (which you can't see here), and more beeswax.

Revised (2014) Dirty Birds #1
Same as the above with the addition of more paper, mica, dye ink, and chalk
 

In the original Dirty Birds #2, the Laura strip is in relatively the same position. I remember circling the word "violin" in pencil because my parents used to make violin-sawing motions with their hands when they thought I was whining, and in 2012, even I was sick of putting up with me.

Original (2012) Dirty Birds #2
Paper collage with décollage on 5 x 7 canvas board. Antique papers, direct-to-paper
gel ink transfers, mica splits, charcoal, beeswax finish.

In the revised Dirty Birds #2, the Laura text has of course been removed and in its place remains only a fragment that more or less reads "will never again" (my motto). To obscure other text in the original version, I used sewing pattern paper, creating a matrix of broken lines with the pattern pieces. The blue ink from the first revision made it into this piece, too, and then I gave myself two stars (from a music practice book, vintage 1950s) for effort. One of the things that children of narcissists have to learn is how to be kind to themselves, and this seemed a good start to the exercise.

Revised (2014) Dirty Birds #2
Same as before, except more paper, including sewing tissue paper,
another mica split, some blue dye ink, and brown chalk
 

I haven't altered the third piece in the series. That doesn't mean I won't, just not today. I'm still kind of attached to Steinem's line about "the Confidence Clinic," and part of me wants to keep a remnant of how I used to be. We'll see how long that lasts.

Original (2012) Dirty Birds #3
Paper collage with décollage on 5 x 7 canvas board. Antique papers, direct-to-paper
 gel ink  transfers, mica splits, charcoal, beeswax finish.

Here's the last in the series, the original Dirty Birds #4. The Laura strip has migrated to the bottom in this piece.

Original (2012) Dirty Birds #4
Paper collage with décollage on 5 x 7 canvas board. Antique papers, direct-to-paper
gel ink transfers, mica splits, charcoal, beeswax finish.

And here's the revised version. New paper has been added, old text has been obscured, but mostly this revision is about the shift in contrast and in color. The blue is brighter and I sloshed some brown ink around until I got an effect that I liked. Less dark. Less stark. More like me. 

Revised (2014) Dirty Birds #4
As described above, with the addition of more paper, dye ink, and chalk.

But it didn't stop there. When I posted the link to this blog on Facebook, one of my friends pointed out that she really liked the Laura text line in the original Dirty Birds #4, the one that said "Having rescued herself, Laura is now the rescuer." It struck me that I really liked that line, too. Thanks to the magic of collage, I was able to restore it easily, simply scratching away the top paper to reveal the text underneath, which had been embedded in a protective casing of beeswax, rather like an artifact in amber.

Second revision of Dirty Birds #4
The new paper has been abraded and the Laura line about rescuing is back.
Because it was embedded in beeswax, the original text was always protected,
even as I was scratching away at the top layer.

Clearly a lot can happen in two years' time. To those who may be struggling, I say...stick with it. There is light, and there is hope, and there are definitely brighter and more vibrant blues.

As always, thanks for listening.




Don't Get Jittery on Me--Part 7, or "Rage, Despair, and...We Hope... Eventually....Hope"

Water is healing. I have usually managed to live on its fringes, even if the water is a wetland, more solid than liquid, more bird or bog turtle than fish. No surprise then that my hand found, on one fine morning, a piece of paper that spoke to me of water and I glued it in place opposite the floating Ophelia doll in my altered book. To those who have been following this series, welcome back. To those who are new, hello.



As you can see, the paper comes from an Old Navy shipping bag. Not much goes to waste around here.

When I glued down the paper, I left space at the top, so I could insert something…like this altered playing card. Nothing special, this playing card, just some verbal diarrhea as would come from a parent who wouldn't let his kids ever finish a sentence. Verbal diarrhea is common in narcissistic parents. The barrage of words on this card is more about emotion than art--a little overwhelming to look at, which was my intent. I sometimes use devices like this to spark feelings in viewers rather than as visuals in and of themselves. I added some texture to the page with pure white mesh, courtesy of the fabulous collage artist Zach Collins, whose work you can enjoy here: http://zachcollinsart.tumblr.com/. Then, while cogitating, I penciled around the text on the facing page, simply to draw attention to the words and to give myself some time to ease into my next steps.

 

The texture of the mesh echoed the shapes of the water droplets. I couldn't resist.

When I alter books, I flip around a lot, going from front to back rather than working through in logical order. Today I was drawn to the opening spread, an important place in any book. You never know when you're going to get brave. Today was, apparently, my day. I was up for foretelling, for scene-setting, for making a statement that would be clear to all those who view this project. Bam. Pow.

For the page facing the jittery girl, I went with a packing-tape transfer depicting a bunch of ghostly parts. That would make anyone jittery, right? The logic appealed to me because I spend a lot of time these days addressing my ghostly parts. I like how the images on the packing-tape transfer highlight the word "repair" on the old paper underneath. This book is definitely about repairing. Families led by a narcissistic parent usually have golden children and scapegoat children. The scapegoat child tends to become the repository for the family's ills and, in a particularly surreal-seeming twist of fate, the scapegoat child usually has a penchant for truth-telling. Like that's welcome! This adds a few more tablespoons of angst to the child's recipe, because who wants the truth?

 

Guess which child I was. Golden or scapegoat? Yup, there's quite a bit to repair here.

 

Here's an overview of the spread. Packing-tape transfer on the left. Acetate overlay onto photo, which renders the image "jittery" with weird interplays of light and movement, at right.

A detail of the packing-tape transfer. This is a honking big transfer--about 5x7. If you're just starting out with this sort of transfer, probably better to build your chops working smaller at first.

I liked what I did with the opening spread, and, so buoyed, flipped to the birdproofing spread that I had constructed last time. If you are so inclined, you can refresh your memory of that work here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/05/dont-get-jittery-on-mepart-6-or.html. Resolving childhood issues gets dicey because there's a tendency to keep wanting to solve the old problems in real time. This can be very hard on current relationships as well as on one's relationship with oneself. I wanted to express that feeling of sorrow, which sometimes verges on hopelessness. When all was said and glued, I was quite pleased with the contrast between the faces of the women and the happy 1964 New York World's Fair Guidebook Disneyland advertisement (altered, of course), on the facing page.

 

So many images, it was hard to choose.

This is where I wound up, showing everything glued down, reality vs. fantasy.

Flipping the page, you get this. Note how the birdproofing mesh interacts with the image of the woman underneath. In an altered book, images often have to work in a number of ways, a challenge that I love to try to meet in unexpected ways. It's very different from flatwork, where a clever juxtaposition can exist in its own dimension, in its own right.

On the right-hand page, I collaged some arms to catch that falling doll and text that hints at the word "potentially." Blessed is the potential in children, all children.

Catch me, please! The arms--and the text snip--come from a 1937 copy of Look magazine.

And then it was back to the water spread, the one with the Old Navy shipping bag, for one last look of the day. Critical mass plays a huge part in my work. The story builds and builds....I flip to and fro...and you layer my honesty imperative on top of the story...and all of a sudden there's a measurable thicknesses of paper.

Here, as you can see, I chose to add a male image to the spread. I thought it made sense with the verbal diarrhea altered playing card in the pocket.

And then I finished up my day with an editorial comment.

In my childhood life, there was always a test. I just had to shoehorn that in.

Enough for today. Thanks, as always, for listening, and for your kind support.

Part 8 in The Jitters resides here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/10/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-8-or-hello.html

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.

 

How to Make a Gel Transfer

"Wild Honeys," Laura Tringali Holmes
Paper collage with mixed media on 5 x 7 canvas board.  Three gel transfers, papers from Les
 Journal des Demoiselles 1837 and various other old publications, handmade paper and fibers, dye
 inks, acrylic glazes, Micron pen, and one wine spill

It is hard to amuse even oneself when writing about how to make a gel transfer, but sometimes one must do what one must do, and I have promised a tutorial. So here goes. I have started with a photo, above, to demonstrate that the results are a whole lot groovier than the process. Making your own transfers is worth doing if you want to communicate feelings of mystery or emotional tension, history or time passing, in your work.

This next photo provides a brief vocabulary lesson on the transparencies I most often use. It's important to note at this point that while all transfers are transparent to some extent, not all transparencies are transfers. I can't count all the people I have managed to confuse by swinging between the terms while chattering about my work.



Everything to the left is a gel transfer. They don't look transparent, but they become semi-so
when you glue  them down. As for the transparencies on the right, the sheet music at the top is a
packing-tape transfer, as is the black-and-white playing card. The sepia-tone woman, plant,
and color playing card are acetate transparencies, not transfers.

You can make gel transfers from black-and-white or color images. Whichever you choose, this will involve photocopying. What you're going to be doing with the gel is slapping it on, letting it dry, and then rubbing off the photocopy paper leaving the ink behind. So no original images please. I'm using a black-and-white photocopy for this tutorial.

You'll get the best black-and-white transfers from an inky photocopy. Inky photocopies come from machines that use toner cartridges. Machines that are not on the cutting edge of technology tend to produce the best photocopies for making black-and-white gel transfers. Give the machine in your public library a try. Sadly, your library is probbly underfunded and making do with an old photocopy machine. Happily, that machine just might produce exactly what you need to make a decent black-and-white gel transfer.

This is an inky black-and-white photocopy.  You might want to start with a
smaller image than I did if you're just getting started with gel transfers.

Going to the library to make the photocopy might be the most exciting part of this process, although there is peace to be found in the repetition of laying down numerous coats of gel and watching them dry. You're looking to build up at least three coats if using a gloss gel, more if using a matte gel. I prefer using a soft gloss gel because it results in the most transparent image, but regular gloss gel provides a sturdier transfer. You can either slop the gel on or go for thin coats. But whatever you do, make sure each coat is thoroughly dry before adding another. You are going to be rubbing the paper off the dried gel down the line, so it's in your best interest to create sturdy layerings.

This is the first coat but it might as well be the second or third. There's
not a whole lot going on visually in this process. And while I like
Golden products, of course you can use other brands successfully. 

Sometimes when I work I like things really flat. Other times I like to create texture, as in the piece at the top of this page. Viewers engage differently with things that are smooth than they do with things that are bumpy. It's a nice detail to be in control of. This is something to keep in mind when brushing out the gel. Do you want ridges or smoothness?



As you can see, I'm leaving the ridges in the second coat. If you use a
matte gel, you won't have the option for big ridges, as it doesn't hold
brush strokes like gloss gel.

After your photocopy is coated, you want to throw it in water and go do something else for at least fifteen minutes. I left a gel transfer in a pot of water for two days once, and it was just fine, so you don't really have to rush back.

Soaking in water.

Now it's time to strip the paper off the back of your built-up gel. The water will have softened the paper, making this much easier than it may sound. A large transfer, like this one, can be unwieldy, expecially if you are hoping to keep it in one piece. If your transfer is large, try supporting it on your wrists. But whether you are working small or large, start rubbing off the paper in the middle of the image, with your thumbs. Like so.

My other thumb should be in the picture, but it's holding the camera.
Notice how the paper is coming off in rolls. That's what you're going for.
Now imagine how those rolls of paper can clog up your sink. Do not do
this directly over your drain!

And here we have it. The finished gel transfer will become semi-transparent after you glue it in place. There will always be some paper fuzz on the back of the transfer, so don't go crazy about that. The best way to neutralize the light-blocking tendency of the paper fuzz is to rub it with some more gel just before you glue it in place. That's rubbed-off paper in the sink strainer and some lemonade with strawberries for me.

And now, at last, an opportunity for wit! One of my favorite altered playing cards using a gel transfer.

"Bird With Heart," Laura Tringali Holmes
Altered playing card with paper collage and mixed media, using bird engraving and gel transfer,
various papers, text snippet, inks, paints, and glazes

Good luck! And thanks, as always, for tuning in.

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.

Un-BIRD-ening in Spring 2012

Last year I found a box of old Audubon bird flashcards on my library's swap shelf. The flashcards sat around my loft for quite some time, but then, just a few weeks ago, I found myself making gel transfers of the images of my favorite birds--the ones who regularly hang out at my deck feeders. These gel transfers seemed to quite naturally gravitate to the texts in some of my favorite old books and magazines. I was hooked. I added a variety of mixed-media techniques...and a bird series was born. The pieces are not quick to make, and there are about a dozen in the pipeline. But the work is a meditative exercise, and gives me time and space to think and feel. I work on these pieces on days when I can throw the loft skylights open and hear the sweet and invigorating music of bird talk.

"Innocent Yet World-Weary"
Gel image transfer of birds from old Audubon flashcards,
old papers, acrylic paint, inks, charcoal pencil, gold pen,
mica dust and beeswax on 5 x 7 canvas

"You've Got to Punctuate"
Gel image transfer of birds from old Audubon flashcards, gel
image transfer of flower from old gardening book, old papers,
acrylic paint, inks, charcoal pencil, gold pen, mica dust, and
beeswax on 5 x 7 canvas

This shot shows the gels soaking in water, prior to peeling.

A look at the image emerging after peeling off some of the paper, like a nestling emerging
from its shell.

And thanks for listening.