New Obsession

I went to the Morgan Library on Thursday with a friend. They have the pages of The Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves on display because they needed to take it apart for conservation. It's really wonderful to see these works. You can see the entire set on their website. It is great.

I have long thought about working in this format and if you think about the veil cards and the artist trading cards. That have a bit of the same feel. You can see I began one. It is 7 x 5 inches. I wanted a tiled floor. And, the flowers in the border. There is a bird - dragon creature in the border too. I am going to add words in a calligraphic style. The "L" of Little Betty Jane will be illuminated. All this done is painted paper collage - of course. I just put the letters on this in photoshop to see how they look. These are at the very beginning. Lots to do and lots of things to work out.

New Work

As you know, I have been playing around with found source collages. I recently went to the "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage" which I absolutely flipped over. I received a couple of catalogs in the mail: Restoration Hardware and Land's End.


I really like the Restoration Hardware catalogbecause all the pages show domestic interiors - although very opulent and arrogantly arty. There is even a page where they made an easel into a support for a flat screen TV. (Ugh!) Collaging into these catalogs seems natural and made me think about the Victorian albums. (I wonder what those women would think if they saw their work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?) The idea of "woman's work" and the place between art and craft - that these works traditionally occupied - is something I relate to. I feel that I wander around that space too. My work being small and about paper dolls.

Here are a few pages:

New Mosaic

I started a new mosaic. I didn't get that far. Even though I like it - just like this, I am going to keep going. I feel it is not yet resolved.

Just about there

This is after an hour and a half yesterday.

And, this is after 2 hours today. That brings me up to a total of 23 hours spent thus far. It is almost finished. I need to just tweek it a bit. Stay tuned...

Big changes

I started to think a lot about what this piece was really about. And, that may always be a problematic process, but I was always explaining what the source material was (Bergdorf Goodman catalogue) and what that had to do with anything. The tiles of the mosaic are made by cutting little rectangles out of the photos of models from a Bergdorf Goodman "Vision" catalog that I found in the laundry room - of all places. The prices in this thing are way out of the realm of any of us who use the laundry room!

So, I made some radical changes. I cut out the reference to Oscar De La Renta - that was on the earlier version. In this top one - you can see the changes made in an hour and a half session yesterday. And, the bottom image is after another 3 hours today.

Further progress

I worked for an hour and a half on this piece - yesterday. I don't know how many hours that is in total - thus far. By the way, if you click on it, you see it at the actual size of the piece. It is about 6 x 4 inches.

Koala and Panda

I am beginning work on a book project. I will be collaborating with my son - Stu. He is going to write the story. I am not a great writer. Here is a little animation I made with the characters - a panda and a koala - showing how they can move. They are paper dolls with movable limbs.