 Fly Away 16" x 20" painted acrylic papers on matboard Several days ago I showed a photo on Instagram/FB of lots of scraps of painted paper on the floor. The above piece came out of those scraps of paper. What I have been doing for these last several pieces is using the remaining negative cutouts that are leftover from the positive shapes that I use in my work. I take those pieces and use them in my monoprints as "masks". They get overprinted with other paints and textures, often with interesting results. Rather than throw them away, I decided that they needed to be put to use. I really like working this way-no grid to follow, no perpendicular lines or right angles, and nothing to straighten up. It suits me well right now.
The title of the piece doesn't really have a specific meaning other than I feel some of the shapes look a little bird like. I am also reading a book about extinction and so I am thinking about the comings and goings of species through time. OK, let me know. Thanks for reading. Libby libbyfife@ymail.com  Round and Round 16" x 20" painted paper collage on board Well, I am super excited about the above piece. The shapes are the leftovers (negative cuttings) from the positive shapes that I use in my collages. I took those cuttings and used them as masks in my monoprinting (done on a gelatin plate aka Gelli plate). In that process, they get paint on them, often in layers. I think this layering of colors is very exciting and when I look at a pile of these pieces I don't know where I the final work will end up. I am guided though by what I think about design: color relationships, contrast, and color saturation. Additionally, I think about line and direction, variability and repetition. It's all governed by proportion for me and I try really hard to make the piece feel balanced. I love very much that I am not working on a "grid" these days but the piece, to me anyway, feels just as organized as if I was using that structure to place my shapes. I feel like I have come a long way here. I am drawing and cutting out my own organic shapes, derived from my own images and drawings. It's very much like acquiring a vocabulary of sorts, rather than just relying on a prescribed set of words in a tiny dictionary, if that makes sense.
Anyway, let me know. Thanks for reading. Libby libbyfife@ymail.com  Odds and Ends 12" x 16" painted paper collage on board I thought the title was pretty apt. Literally, the piece above is made with the leftover cuttings (negative pieces) from previous works. Additionally, they have been used in my monoprints so they now have served two purposes. Not bad, huh?
This piece came about by accident. I had these leftover pieces sitting on a white board on the floor. They were just there to dry. I looked at them and thought that there was something that looked good. They looked almost like gestural marks. I have always shied away from gesture painting, believing that my tendency to straighten and tidy up wouldn't work with that particular style. I am very deliberate though I strive for work that doesn't look worked over. In any case, I thought why not? This is just line work and shapes and direction, color and value. I can do that right? And so I did. I like the outcome a lot and am working on getting another piece going. We will see. The whole experience though led me to develop a work flow of sorts. It helps to think actively about how you work. I think there is less stress this way. You at least know how to start right? I tend to begin with these doodle drawings which lead to cut out shapes. The cut out shapes are put together in a collage piece (like what I normally do). Those leftover cuttings (the negative pieces) are then used in my monoprints as masks. They get paint on them. They are then used in a piece such as the one shown above. It's a kind of workflow and I like it. I'll see what else comes of this idea. In the meantime, thanks for reading. Let me know. Libby libbyfife@ymail.com  Follow The Leader 16" x 20" painted paper collage Generally I keep notes while I am working these pieces. Ideas occur to me for other pieces or I have some kind of clarity regarding the piece at hand. There is normally something. For this piece, I mostly focused on establishing a value pattern of sorts. This is hardly a reason to make art (to follow a fundamentally academic concept) but I felt that the piece could get very busy and disorganized in a hurry which is not what I am after. Establishing a pattern of lights, mediums and darks (values) can help the viewer to not be overwhelmed, hopefully. And it's always my intention to be kind of tidy with things; succinct if you will. Even if I don't achieve this with everything it's always one of my goals.
I am currently reading a book about paleontology, how it evolved in the 19th century and some of the people that got caught up in what became known as "the bone wars". Human greed is quite a thing. It really seems to motivate people but gets them going in the wrong direction, often to their own detriment. I like that these pieces sort of have the figures following each other, kind of rolling and swirling around. The movement is a function of the drawings that I make and use to start these pieces but I also think on a deeper level, I must see life and its players as constantly moving, changing, leading and following. Life is never standing still and yet we try and pretend that it is. Time is both infinite and finite, always moving forward. As I reflect on the piece above, those are my thoughts. Let me know. libbyfife@ymail.com PS-I omitted any eyeballs on my figures this time. I think it keeps things at a better level of finish.  Gathering 16" x 20" painted acrylic papers gessoed hardboard I should have named this The Image That Almost Wasn't. It's very easy to get trapped into a way of making work that is familiar and comfortable. It feels very safe right? People have liked your work before and they will probably like it again...so long as it doesn't change. This is external validation/permission type stuff though and has nothing to do with making art that comes from another part of your brain. It's the part of your brain that says, "Oh yes, I'd really like to try that." and "Well, let's just see what happens." and "If it sucks, then it sucks and no big deal." That's the part of your brain that you want to listen to because listening to it will help to nurture it and will help you to make work that feels like you, even if it is not at a Picasso level of skill. As my friend Carol has told me, your work matters because it is your work. (More or less, this is what she offered to me in the way of help.)
For months now I have been making these doodles. They are an offshoot of when I used to quilt and I did allover patterns of meandering quilting. The doodles turned into drawings of sorts that were informed by stuff that I saw: alphabets, animals, and other images in my environment. The doodles also were a nod to my reading. Figures showed up that look vaguely like fishes, birds and other sorts of creatures. I love the idea of an imaginary world that has some realistic underpinnings. I also love the idea of creatures interacting together. I could never deliberately draw that sort of thing though but the doodles are a kind of "gateway" into a quasi-drawing kind of world. Whatever shows up, shows up. I really like the surprises that happen. I also really like that I am thinking in the same sorts of terms as when I make more structured and intentional work: hue, chroma and value. Direction, repetition and variation, proportion, that sort of stuff. It's really important to me that the thought processes that I worked really hard to establish remain in play when I make any kind of art-no matter if the shapes are geometric and structured or more biomorphic like in the above piece. I call this singularity in approach and thought "staying on the bus" and it is a direct result from having read this article by James Clear. Along with some other free and sage advice I have received over the years, this piece of advice is always one that I come back to. (And if you haven't read the article I suggest you give it a read. If you know an artist who is struggling to "find their voice" this may be the break that they need.) In any case, I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. I am now interested to see if I can do this type of work again and how I might mix it up. In other words, what is going to happen next and how can I make that happen. Happy New Year to all reading and to those of you that have paid attention to my posts and work this year. Your efforts are appreciated! Thanks, Libby libbyfife@ymail.com  Before The Deluge 12" x 16" Painted Paper Collage As I make these pieces, I take notes in my sketchbook/journal. The notes help me to remember what I was thinking about during the process of putting the piece together. The above work was started with a doodle drawing that I did based on shapes from the Hebrew alphabet. I meant to follow that drawing exactly since I really liked it. I can see from reading my notes that although I had a sketch as my guide, I was nervous that the piece would just become a collection of shapes with each shape not being related to the other-no cohesive narrative in other words. I always worry about deviating from a good plan and I become anxious about a lack of some sort of narrative or "structure" for these collages. I should know better by now because a kind of story generally emerges whether I follow the original plan or deviate from it.
As I was working myself into a lather about all of that, I started to tell myself a little story. It involved Noah and the flood, fossils, and the gathering up of all of the creatures on Earth. I put the drawing aside and began to focus on the shapes, both the positive ones and the ones being made in the negative spaces. I came up with some symbols that I wanted to use and some other details that I wanted to add. I am pleased to have used some of the drawn characters that I sketched a while ago. (These are the ones in my sketchbook that were just for fun and I didn't know what I would do with them.) As I finished things up, it seemed to me that I had gone past the constraints of the drawing, as much as I liked it, and had gotten somewhere else that was equally as good as my original idea. For me, just as good. I can see that I am going in a particular direction with these last several pieces. I have done some thinking and writing about this but haven't solidified anything yet. I am going to keep working and to keep an open mind. It's easy for me to cling to what has worked for me in the past rather than slowly and incrementally moving in a different direction. I'll just have to see. Hope everyone had a nice holiday. Thanks for reading. Libby  Creature Feature 2 16" x 20" painted paper collage Earlier in the year I started making funny little paper collage creatures. They were only for my sketchbook and used leftover shapes from my finished pieces. It was just a fun way to learn about color and to see what appeared when various shapes were thrown together. I just couldn't see how to use them in my work outright, as shapes unto themselves. So, I set the idea aside.
Later on in the year, I bought Carla Sonheim's book, Drawing and Painting Imaginary Animals. The exercises were fun to do. In one of them she has you looking at sidewalks and asphalt to find "animals" in the cracks and crevices. I made up my own exercise using crumpled paper and rubber stamp ink. I found animals in the lines created when I rubbed the ink across the creased paper. Again though, I couldn't see how to use the little creatures that I drew. All of the fiddling that I did with the shape creatures kind of lead to just some general doodling. I am an inveterate doodler from way back. (I used to doodle on my underwriting worksheets when I worked in a bank.) It's actually more noodling than pictures of anything specific. It does remind me of Keith Haring's work, though my scribbles are certainly a pale reflection of his ideas. I also accidentally found the work of Inez Johnston and rediscovered the work of Carla Accardi. All of this is to say that I felt I had permission to turn my doodles and paper creatures into something. The outcome may not be as sophisticated or well done as the above artists but I felt it was important to at least try. I like what came out, though it was a nerve wracking kind of process, not knowing what I was doing exactly. I started with my doodles and picked out a shape here and there. I drew the shape and refined it till I had what I wanted. I then transferred the shape to the painted paper and cut and glued. I used the same sets of questions that I always use regarding color relationship, value and chroma. I tried to pay attention to the repetition and variation among the colors and shapes and I employed the dots to bring in a kind of line movement. These are all things that I try to do with my regular collages. So, I feel my sensibilities are intact and it's only the shapes that are evolving. Things did get a little busy but that is OK. That happens to me sometimes and I don't exactly mind. The board is only 16" x 20" after all. So now what? Do I try this again? I think so, yes. I enjoy the doodling and would like to continue with shapes that are more curvilinear rather than rectilinear (though a good mix of two is useful). I think I captured a kind of narrative though maybe not anything definite. I do love that the paper creatures are interacting though it isn't quite like one of my reference objects.  Midnight Madness 16" x 20" painted paper collage on matboard This piece started with a random word generator web site that I found on the Internet. I used the site to randomly generate words based on syllable length and what letter they started with. I then used select words to create images and a sort of story.
I was really sort of stuck for how to begin and this idea of a word generator helped quite a bit. Selecting images to represent some of the words like midnight, medicine and media was fairly easy. But then I also mixed in some childhood memories of my grammar school. The building had black and white linoleum floors and prior to the demolition of the upper story, the hallways were a kind of mint green color. I was also sort of inspired by the book, Goodnight Moon. The illustrator used a kind of purple blue color to portray the night sky through the window. The Brownie camera and hands were images that I have been wanting to use. I guess the piece ended up being a kind of mash up of my thoughts which I think is just fine. I tried a new to me media this time. It's called Duralar and it's a kind of acetate replacement material. It comes in both clear and matte forms. I am always looking for ways to draw freely with my acrylic pens without drawing directly onto the painted surface of the board or the shapes that are glued down. What if I screw up, which frankly, is very possible. The Duralar was meant to bypass that possibility. The clear version was very difficult to see to cut. Also, though the glue dries clear, you can still see it through the material. The matte was OK to cut but I still had the same problem with the glue showing. The whole thing sort of turned into a craft project (no insult intended to crafters, OK?). It's OK though. I am glad I tried it and who knows? Maybe it has other uses that I don't know about yet. I am gathering ideas for my next piece. I also need to paint papers. I have accepted that some days are better than others; my connection to my art waxes and wanes. The only thing that matters I think is that I am thinking and gathering ideas, even if it is only through finding words or images. Put it this way. You can't draw money from your savings account if you don't make regular deposits. Alright, send me an email if you like. libbyfife@ymail.com Libby  So Simple a Beginning 16" x 20" painted paper collage The title comes from The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. I didn't set out to use that quote as the basis for this work but it was the idea that arose about halfway through the making of the piece.
As I was working, I tried to get a grasp on the several different ways that I start a piece. Sometimes I already have a title in mind along with different images that I want to use. Sometimes too I just start with random shapes and no idea at all in mind. Those are sort of the black and white, cut and dried ways of starting. The other two ways are a little more gray. I may start with a few different images in mind and maybe a loose idea. Things evolve from there and firm up. Conversely, I might just have a shape that I want to use and once I use it and add other shapes a story might suggest itself. I am always looking for a solid way to start that won't be so damn hard so this thinking and analyzing is meant to help me get going when I feel like I can't. The above piece has some ideas for me. I like the idea of the spine and the pelvis connected. I turned the pelvis into a kind of flower shape. I used strawberries to stand in for the heart and the pink circles are a nod to the intestines but also to a crawling sort of bug that you might find in the garden (or the intestines!). The green "netting" is meant to stand in for blood vessels and capillaries. The blue squiggles below could be intestinal ideas or maybe even some of those little villi that line the gut. There is the pink rectangle breathing life into all of it while the yellow and black border reminded me of a National Geographic magazine. They are all "Libby" kinds of things and I would expect the viewer to get their own ideas of what might be going on. Speaking of which, if anyone is reading, let me know what you see! Thanks, Libby |
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