hiss.

the nap, and a day's distance, didn't help. i ordered 8 copic sketch markers last night . . . woot! that made me feel better, as new art supplies always do. lol.

Ranting and Raving about Collage Art

So I'm sick and tired of receiving mail art in arranged swaps that relies almost 90% on purchased collage sheets. I love swapping ATCs and chunky-book pages, but frankly, they are supposed to be little pieces of art, not the same kind of collage we might've thrown together for a grade-school nutrition project by cutting up our mom's copies of Family Circle and Good Housekeeping.

I can't take it. I spend a lot of time on my collages--both in painting and distressing vintage book pages and paper towels for background elements, to locating just the right colors and papers to use, to having the best possible quotes or words or handwriting on my work, to using photographs that I own myself or that I spent at least some amount of time locating for myself. I worry about composition, layering, originality and whether or not the work has an overall statement to make. I create my own collage sheets to save on paper/color photocopying costs, but I don't go on etsy and buy someone else's sheets of crappy, overused, colorized vintage images of little girls in butterfly wings to make my art "easier."

Creating collage is not supposed to be about shortcuts and time-savers . . . it's still supposed to be art. I don't really know if there is any great amount of art involved in cutting images out of a three-dollar collage sheet and glue-sticking them onto a playing card.

I think this may be why I'm hand-drawing more stuff, because I am becoming a collage snob. And I don't like my collages lumped into the same category with collages that look like they came right off a production line.

ugh. Perhaps I just need a nap.

I wrote something!

So I'm not saying it's fantastic, but it's using the prompt of "writing a poem of return." Here it is.

Home

This town lies
eight wide states away from you.

The smell of this house—
jars of Moroccan lemons, fresh towels,
wild fennel from the yard
my husband's sweat on my skin—
doesn't include you.

You have never sat on this couch,
one ankle crossing the other knee,
staring through my blouse
during a small dinner party.

But I keep opening the front door,
I continue to let you in.


___________

note:

what i like here is how the first line and the last line work alone . . . "This town lies . . . I continue to let you in." I don't even remember where i read about that as a "hidden" technique for adding meaning. i also like that first line break, that makes the mini-sentence "This town lies." it's funny, to me, how quickly those kind of choices become important to me in a little breezy exercise. lol.

Wednesday Poetry Prompts

So, Writers Digest gives a poetry prompt every Wednesday, and I think I'm going to start trying to do this. Of course, this week's twitter post didn't have a link, so I'm going to start with last week's prompt, which is to write a poem of return.

Wednesday Poetry Prompt

I'll post again today when I have something drafted. :)

Painted Paper Towels: A Tutorial

I have been tossing about the idea of making a few tutorials that cover how I make the components of my mixed-media art . . . and this is the first.

In collage projects, I use painted-and-dried paper towels for texture as well as a way to add saturated color to a work. Through my flickr account, I created a little photo walk-through of the process. You can find it here.

Painted Paper Towels

I am going to go out on a technological limb this week and try to do something with a video camera and see if I am capable of creating a YouTube tutorial, too. I'm not promising anything, as I'm pretty easily frustrated with such nonsense.

Back from the Land of the Relatives!

OMG, it took me far too long to recuperate from my visit to my parents' home. ugh. but, i'm going to try to blog a bit more in the coming weeks. i'm caught up on mail art trades, and while i'm working on a painting for my own living room, i'm pretty freed up, despite finishing up the teaching of a few summer-school classes.

i've missed this!