Surrealistic Circus

A Dark Horse Collage

DOH!!! Here's to you Katy Perry:

 

This collage piece is made up of 4 different songs.
Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" (the scenario), Tom Petty's "Just a face in the crowd" (swoon), Prince's "Purple Rain" (warning) and Annie Herring's "Sing Over Me". Just 'another story' playing out hard.

So what's a dark horse?
HMMM 'a little unknown person or thing that emerges to prominence." "a contestant that seems unlikely to succeed unexpectantly wins."

Perfect Storm: "an expression that describes some event where a rare combination of circumstances will aggravate a situation drastically." "a detrimental or calamitous situation or event arising from the powerful combined effect of a unique set of circumstances." SO DON"T FORGET THAT CALAMITOUS.

 The TERM is used to describe an actual phenomenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude.
The METAPHOR is that of a synergy of forces leading to a release of energy much greater than its individual contributors would ever generate, but the storm part, i.e. the energy release is DESTRUCTIVE, [but probably not?]

Purple Rain (C/- Prince) The rain that comes after judgement. Quote from His Royal Badness tour "When there's blood in the sky - red and blue = purple. Purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/God guide you through the purple rain." Prince was into apolcalyptism in recording his song Purple Rain. It was about him receiving judgement if he took another man's lover.

Underwater Sea scene

Water colour crayons and charcoal were used to create sea like abstract creatures. Collaged star fish elements were then added over this. Also added were acrylic paint molds and diamantes.

Mucha: The Moon and the Stars: The Moon

Here is my rendition of Mucha's The Moon and the Stars. The poster in the middle was produced in 1902. In this collage piece I have used melted scented wax that has been impressed with various stamps. These have then been adhered by modelling paste onto the board. The middle has a light dusting of glitter with black sand, and some of the melted wax also has added glitter and black sand. I have used Prima Marketing's Bindery paper and Graphic 45 Kraft to add the ephemera look, and the final touch is dry painting a wood glaze over the modelling paste and parts of the collage.

Rossetti's Daydream

So here's to the young painter Rossetti. One of my favourite artists, part of the brotherhood of the pre-Raphaelite movement. They painted with true authentic aesthetics, when artists were artists.

Ah yes, take me back to the omnicompetence of the artists, when their art was their legacy. Where are the Rossetti's, Michelangelo's, and Giulio's today? I guess just waiting for a benefactor to own their 'hand and soul':P

Turmoil

A friend's drama ... her birdcage of turmoil.

Don't ask me what paramour means, I didn't know!!!

Winnie the Pooh Loves Emma!

Yes, it's true Winnie the Pooh has finally fallen in love with Emma, my stepdaughter.
Emma is turning 21, and she still adores Winnie. So to celebrate her occasion, I got a large board and covered it with ripped up pages from a Winnie the Pooh book I had bought second hand, cut out images of her as a child, to be included in with the stories; and then finally added flowers and what nots, and put in other photos of her nestled within the flowers.







Products used on this are Jolee's Boutique Winnie the Pooh stickers, Prima flowers, Kaiser Fusion Felt flower borders, Winnie the Pooh embroidered motifs, and Cricut diecut Winnie the Pooh shapes.

Mucha Harp Player

As I have a collection of Mucha designed cards, doing nothing in my drawers, I am working them into works of art of some sort.

The last Mucha piece I did was a Mucha dancer on canvas, this one is on board using Lici's look she has done on her blog (fashion art boards).

I have added fibres which are meant to be representative of the harp strings.

Art Journalling: Session 7 - What are you reading?

This year I have reacquainted myself with the novel. Any spare time I can get, I'll devour myself in a novel. The books I read often give me inspiration for art pieces, or themes and subjects that I wish to study.

So what book have you just read? Or are reading? And it doesn't have to be a novel to do this session.

I've been reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronté. This lady was a literary genius. For those who do not know this novel, its genre is Gothic Romantic (i.e. a mixture of the metonymy of gloom and horror, melancholy, foreboding landscapes and weather; with romance - pursuit, emotions and senses, alluring affection, conflict). It is a wild, passionate story of intense and monomaniacal* love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father.


The novel explores revenge, desire, love and insanity. Both Catherine and Heathcliff are rebellious, passionate, cruel, misanthropic, isolated, and wilful, have mysterious origins, lack family ties, reject external restrictions and control, and seek to resolve their isolation by fusing with a love object. Their love is cursed, as lovers they are cursed resulting in their insanity.

In this session you can make a double page spread collage in your journal by collecting and cutting out images depicting scenes from your novel, and descriptive words symbolising the novel's message.

For me I used words such as wild, violent, tempestuous, vengeance, revenge, love, passion, desire. Then I also used quotes of what the characters said to each other e.g. "Heathcliff is more myself than I am" and "I am Heathcliff", says Catherine of her unattainable lover. While Catherine is dying Heathcliff says to her "I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul."

Add other images to the collage such as acetate words and hearts. Also add any other material that epitomizes their end. I've used a quote from the Song of Songs (love poem in the bible). I have used a gel medium on my page so when I wrote the words I used a Sharpie pen which allowed me to write over glossy surfaces.

* When I researched a little about the novel (okay I can be a nerd at times) I uncovered that psychologists have examined its contents; and one of them describes their love as being monomaniacal. That is going to the extremes, of a singularization, uber-singleminded determination.

Further notes
Derek Traversi calls it "a thirst for religious experience". The existence of spirit - afterlife.

Dorothy van Ghant calls it "a metaphysical exploration". Mystery of the numinous.
Metaphysics is the branch of speculative inquiry which treats of the first principles of things, including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space, cause, identity, etc; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science of Being and Knowing.

Art Journalling: Session 2 - First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin

Collage your Favourite Song
– and then interpret its meaning


What you will need:
4 different colours of paint which are of the same colour palette (warm colours or cool colours).*
jar of water
paintbursh
Magazines, brochures, etc

* Warm colours are reds, yellows, pinks, oranges, etc - think of the sun, its colour and heat; cold colours are blues, greens, purples, etc – think of water, the sea - it’s usually cold)

Think about a song you like. What is it that you find attractive about it? Is it just the music, the tune, the melody? Or is it the words that are sung?

I love such a diverse range of music and, sometimes, I don’t know if it is just the beat and the arrangement of various musical instruments, ingeniously put together to make music, that sounds so astounding; or whether it is just the words or the combination of both music, voice and lyrics? I still don’t know. What I do know is that I love the harmonic voice of women, particularly Polynesian women when they sing. Oh how I wish I could sing like them. But my favourite singers all tend to be … yes male …. Ummm maybe it's just that I'll never be able to sing like them at all, at least I can try and replicate women singers.

I don’t really like one song out of them all. I do have my iTunes rated with all my favourite songs (5 is the best, to 1 the least – but it’s still a favourite).

So art journalling a song, I decided to do a take on Leonard Cohen’s “First we Take Manhattan and then we take Berlin”. Just don’t get it, or what that song it about.
But I love the verses that talk about imagery and the juxtaposition of describing that imagery, I mean only a man could say ‘the beauty of our weapons.’

And that’s it the beauty of our weapons isn’t about war, but about the invention and design of them and their capability … all used for harm though, what else? That's a shame.

To help me with this piece I painted in four colours (corals, reds, pinks and yellows) one side of my journal page, and then did a wash on the other side, with these same colours.

First I titled the page with the song and then collected together images of the song paying attention to their size and colour – I needed to make sure they were a good fit for the amount of space I had and that the colours were warm, maybe a few cool colours. I then cut them or ripped them out, and loosely arranged them on one side of the page, before gluing down. Make sure you also show some of the paint, so don’t collage the whole page.


I then put the words on the other side of the page with my feeble attempts of interpreting what Leonard was trying to say … perhaps he didn’t really know.

Tip: A good idea is to start collecting images from magazines, brochures, etc that you may wish to use in your art or collage. File these away in generic folders, e.g. you could have men, women, vintage bits and pieces, toys, cities, buildings, music instruments, or any other topic.