at home on the wing

inspired by robyn's collage pages, i signed up for shelley klammer's online collage course. i just could not get robyn's collage images out of my mind. i started the lessons on sunday night -- this is my second collage; i'm doing one every night. the first one is at the end of the post, and the third one isn't finished. i'm beginning to think that collage isn't as mysterious or difficult as i thought it was. like everything in art, it seems to be mostly a matter of jumping in and letting go. at this point when i 'mess up' it looks like it's my subconscious (supraconscious?) mind telling me that the area could use some 'work' -- the 'mess up' seems to be a sort of indicator, if that makes any sense. i 'messed up' on the left side of this -- got carried away with a white pen a friend recently gave me. so i covered up most of it with turquoise and blue acrylic paint. somehow it seemed to make Laughing Leaping Woman laugh even harder! i loved it! i see this happening over and over... mess up, keep going, it's okay in the end. there's a quote by anahata katkin that goes something like this: 'everything's okay in the end. if it's not okay, it's not the end'.

yeah.



last week i spent a lot of time working on my art group journal. this is what the cover looks like now. who knows what it'll end up like. that's a degas sculpture on the left. i read that none of his sculptures were taken seriously by the 'art world' when he was alive. too crude, they said. which just goes to show that we really should ignore the 'art world'. i like the painting of the rabbit underneath too...



the inside front cover (yeah, i really am into cutting up dictionary pages in this journal). it had a chair on it in the pic a couple of weeks back. the clay sculpture is by debra fritts. i cut the picture out of an 'american craft' magazine (i think) a long time ago. i love it here.



the first page in the journal. i think it'll stay like this. the name of our group is 'open doors' and that bit of blue is my open door.



the last two pages i've finished. is there anything i didn't use here?! the right page has pine needles from roxanne, a piece of crocheted doily, misc. papers, and paint. the left page has four hunks of bark on it plus a bunch of paint and paper. all waxed... there are things that i like about it and things that i don't. it could change. i've started gluing down more pieces of dictionary on the next page -- left brain is ecstatic!



my first collage. i think i feel like the yellow bird most of the time. i'm delighted (and relieved) that the beautiful creature in the foreground knows the way!