Papier-Mache Art Bowls 11: Paper, Pencils, Fractals, Talismans

After drying the latest batch in the sun, and looking it over, I think this group is of mixed success. One or two experimental ideas produced lovely results, and one or two were acceptable if not first-rate. Not every experiment succeeds, after all: but the definition of an experiment, in both science and art, is that you learn as much from the failures as from the successes.



This particular experiment was of mixed quality. The idea was simple: I had recently purchased some beautiful hand-made marbled art paper at Wet Paint in St. Paul, a terrific art supply store that I visit every time I'm in the Twin Cities. When I lived in St. Paul, this was my primary source for all my art supplies. I purchased several sheets of beautiful hand-made papers, with the intention of using them for papier-maché projects, but perhaps also for hand-made books. Some of the sheets are sewable with thread, which sparks some interesting ideas combining multi-media, paper, and fiber art.

I made extensive photos of each of the sheets of art paper before filing them away, to be used for art projects.



I took a few of these art-paper photos and layered them in Photoshop, to make a more complex paper. I then printed that out as laser prints, and used the prints to make this bowl.



It's very pretty, visually, as it reflects the source material. The only thing lacking, I feel, is the texture of the hand-made papers. This is laser-printed photographs, which in many cases is terrific material for a papier-maché piece with a specific theme. I feel that some of my art bowls made from my prints have been like illustrations, in three-dimensional form rather than in book form. But this is pictures of paper, used as paper. So it's a bit "virtual," a bit removed from the original. As I said, visually it looks great; but tactilely it is a bit disappointing. Still, it might be a nice bowl to keep some other art supplies in, on my art desk.

So, an interesting experiment that almost works. What might work with this kind of collaged print paper in future is to use it as a background behind other papier-maché layered projects. For example, a tableau or vignette background framing photographs or illustrations; like a framed matte.

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This is my favorite piece from this session of making papier-maché. I really enjoy its whimsy and color. It looks good from any angle, and is bright and colorful in the sunlight.

The process of making this bowl began with an experiment with colored pencils. I made random areas of color on a fibrous, dense paper that I knew would tear easily, and be good for papier-maché. I filled the sheet with colored pencil shapes, mostly rough triangles, then tore the sheet into other random shapes with no regard for where the colors were placed. In other words, the patches of color were themselves broken up by being torn up without regard to their forms. Then I assembled the bowl in another random order with no regard for color placements. What results is a pleasing riot of randomized color shapes, all hand-sketched using pencils. So for me this bowl feels more organic, more like an actual drawing, more "purely artistic."

This art bowl a bit of an homage to Henri Matisse, whose late-in-life works made with colored paper and scissors I admire greatly. Matisse is one of my artistic heroes precisely because he never stopped exploring and experimenting; he rarely repeated something once he had mastered it, and continually looked to new materials for inspiration. Towards the end of his life, when illness confined him to a wheelchair, and he was unable to paint, he had an assistant cover sheets of paper with solid washes of gouache, then cut out shapes with scissors and assembled them to make art. His illustrated book Jazz is a masterpiece made in this manner. Both whimsical and grand, humorous and serious, Jazz set a high standard for hand-made art books to follow. (The complete book is available in scale reproduction as a book, from publisher George Braziller.)



The colored pencils used here are mostly water-proof, although some colors did run a little when they were still wet. I daubed up the excess with a paper towel, as I usually do, and when the bowl dried everything looked smooth and solid again. It's a denser paper, absorbent like water-color paper, thicker and rougher of texture. This bowl actually dried faster than any of the others, in the sunlight. I am very pleased with how the color shapes came out; I'll probably try this technique again later. I might also try it with water-soluble colored pencils, which when wetted in the papier-maché matrix might run and blur into interesting solid colors.

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This is a relatively large bowl made using paper prints of Photoshop pieces I had made a few years ago.

I have in the past designed gift-wrapping and other papers, patterns that could also be used for fabrics or wallpapers, based on fractal art generated from the Mandelbrot Set. I designed and collaged these forms in Photoshop, and printed sheets of paper via laser and inkjet printers. I have actually used these papers myself to wrap presents for family and friends.

This bowl was envisioned to use a colorful fractal pattern on the exterior, and a related fractal pattern on the interior, but in grayscale and B&W. The contrast between the almost painfully colorful exterior, and the serene, staid interior is intentional.



Fractals fascinate me, both for their elegant mathematical simplicity, and the beautiful, complex visual graphics that can be generated from those elegant mathematical formulae. I am certainly not the first artist to be fascinated by fractals—I have a special section on my bookshelves just for books on fractals and chaos theory, many of which are gorgeously illustrated—yet the infinite possibilities inherent in fractal-generated visual art make it possible for every artist to do something very different with the same materials.

My intent here was to make an illustrated art bowl using some of my fractal wrapping paper. I made a fairly large bowl, thinking it would interesting to use it as a container for other fractal-based art I might make later on. For now, it's just loud and fun to look at.

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Marigold Shamanic Healing Bowl

This bowl I made purely for myself, and was the reason I began this current session of making papier-maché. Prior to going in for surgery, I had made a piece of visual art for myself, to use an invocation for healing. I combined a photo I had made of a field of marigolds with the image of my most recent EKG. I made a print of this piece and took it with me during surgery, to place in my hospital room where I could look at it every day and remind myself to heal, to get better, and to overcome.



The day I made this current group of papier-maché pieces was the first day since I had returned home from the hospital that I had felt run down, tired, and upset, out-of-sorts, and just plain icky. I was feeling a lot of emotions from the surgery and the hospital stay, and my body was likewise complaining of the traumas it had been put through.

As I have said many times before, sometimes the best thing to do, on such dismal days, is make art. When I make art, as I've also said before, I forget about everything else, and think only about what I'm doing. So even though I felt fairly lousy that morning, I made these papier-maché pieces. This Healing Bowl, made entirely for myself, was the only art I intentionally set out to make that morning. I am pleased with the results on several levels. The bowl was made to be another reminder to continue my healing journey, evoking once again the many healing properties of marigolds, and it sits now on the table in my bedroom.

Marigolds were also a favorite flower from my childhood in India. They grow prolifically there, and are used in many rituals, from weddings to temple offerings, from funerals to bouquets offered to the person you love. Their fragrance is wonderful, they are edible, and they are used in many healing potions and as a cooking herb. I love marigolds in every shape and variety, and I grow them now in my own garden.



This bowl uses my marigold/EKG image on its exterior, for color and to evoke a restoration of perfect health. The interior of the bowl uses several repeated copies of a drawing I made of the Horned God last autumn, which I scanned into the computer, then manipulated in Photoshop.

For my recovery from this traumatic, high-risk major surgery, for my journey through to new health, for the next surgery and recovery that I must still endure—for all that and more, I will invoke every Power that I can think of, summon all the help I can get, and rely on my family and friends for their support, both practically and in terms of prayers, good thoughts, wishes for well-being, or anything else that is offered. I am going through a major life-changing experience here, and I'll take all the help I can get, in whatever form it's offered! And I am and will remain eternally grateful for all of it. Beyond the gratitude, also, is a new life, which remains still a Mystery to me for now, but which I do know will be worth going through all the pain and suffering I have been going through now, including the surgery and recovery. It's all worth it in the end.

I put all of these thoughts into this Healing Bowl as I made it, channelling my intentions and hopes and prayers into my art-making. A ritual of art-making, an intention for the art that is made. Therefore, I don't really care if someone thinks this bowl is not as aesthetically beautiful as some other art I've made before. That's not the point. The purpose here is to focus my thoughts on my own healing, to remind myself that this process is going to take some time, and to be patient with that—and I can be patient, knowing that everyone I love is thinking of me, and wishing me well.

And art is one way to help me stay focused on that, and one way to make it manifest.

So Mote It Be!

New Photoshop Collages

Or are they montages. Or assemblages. The definitions are a bit vague, and there's a lot of overlap. Actually, not to worry. I just play around and make the things. Let someone else do the due diligence about clarifying the art-historical definitions. At the moment I can't be bothered.

Some recent work, then. Some new pieces. Some experiments in Photoshop in combining elements into a new work. Some experiments in photography and and typography, and overlap between. Some type effects made in Photoshop, still an underutilized design tool. The design tools are only as good as the designer's conceptions, after all; it's the user that drives.

All of these made from photos taken within the past month, on a few evenings when I wanted to make something, but was too tired to do much more than sit in the comfy chair with the laptop. The process of creativity often begins with looking at what you have, then starting to play around with it. Ideas and concepts might emerge from the play, leading you towards a particular artistic outcome, but the process of play is at least as important as the product, to the artist. I play around like this a lot, but not all the products get finished, or are exceptionally interesting, or even good art. You have to be willing to fail.

(Click on images for larger versions.)


Spring Flowers 2011

Including a haiku spawned by the artwork, written in response to the flower essences, and included in the work:

spring awakening
at the well of pollen
divine light of bees


Bushmills Warhol

Could also be titled "The monkey approaches the blowtorch." A spontaneous bit of photography Alex and I did with our cameras at a St. Paul pub near his apartment on my last visit there, before he moved down to New Mexico. We had been running errands all day, and stopped in for a meal, and also a drink with the meal. We got into playing with the close up and macro features of our cameras, using props on the table, and, well, our monkey selves.

So this is sort of a self-portrait, Warholized, but not really, since Alex took the shot. Or did he? I can't remember.


Roads 2011, no. 1

Photos taken while driving. Here displayed side by side, in order, as a triptych. The hour was blue, twilight after sunset, driving home from far away. I love how headlights make streaks of light on longer exposures.


Roads 2011, no. 2

A layered composite of the same frames previously shown side by side. Various masking and combining techniques used in Photoshop to get this. Using Layers in Photoshop is a basic technique for collage, or whatever we want to call it.

What really caught my eye here were two elements: the overpass bridge, the way it both defines and breaks up the skyline at dusk; and the reflections of blurred lights on the hood of my own vehicle. My eye keeps going to those elements, more than to others. The overall effect is pleasing, though. It will interesting to try something like this as a video, again with long time exposed frames.

Fun with Photoshop Type Effects

Among other projects, I'm working on new video projects for Liquid Crystal Gallery, our collaborative DVD and streaming original video and music project. (Now that my studio computer is working again, I'm back in gear with these and similar projects. I also have plans to make a new spacemusic CD.)

What I've decided to do for the titling of each new short film is make artistic titles, involving animated type and artistic usage of type. To that end, I've been playing around in Photoshop with some interesting typographic effects. I thought I'd present a short how-to here.



First up, let's play around with making a photo-based header for the Dragoncave. The techniques used here are very simple and straightforward, as long as you are using a version of Photoshop later than 4.0, so that you can use layers.

First up, open a new file and set the type. "Dragoncave" here is set in ITC Eras Ultra, a bold titling face that comes from a large family of interrelated faces. Ultra is the heaviest weight. For this type of project you'll want to use bold type, so that embedded artwork shows through clearly.

Next, duplicate your type layer and rasterize the duped layer (i.e. convert the font to pixels on the new layer). Use the selection tool to select the type of your rasterized font layer; the rest of the layer will be transparent.

First, however, scale your type to the size you need for the finished piece (or larger) before rasterizing it. I always work at a large file size, at print resolution (300dpi) or better. This gives you a more leeway with which to work. I often make my files larger than the final piece, so that I can scale down at completion. When you scale artwork down from your master file, you avoid the jagged edges and dithering caused when you have to scale a file up. So it's always wise to work at a larger size, then reduce at the end.

Next, go to your layer where you've pasted your photograph that you are going to put inside the letters of "Dragoncave." Select that layer in the Layers palette, while leaving the rasterized type selected; it will show dotted outlines of a selection still active.

On the artwork layer, click on the Layer Mask icon on the Layers Palette. This immediately converts your selection into a mask for the active layer containing your artwork. You'll see that your artwork now shows through the type outlines as artwork. But depending on whether your mask was set to default black, or white, you might fins instead, that the type outlines are see-through rather than containing the image. To correct this, simply reverse the layer mask's color with the Invert command.

That makes the basic art-filled type outline image. Now we'll make the drop shadow effects. (Current versions of Photoshop have automated Drop Shadow filters and effects and styles, which you can do in one step if you wish. I like to make my own effects manually, sometimes, which gives me a lot of precision control. Sometimes the automated settings in scripts don't do exactly what you want.)

So, duplicate your original type layer again, and rasterize the new layer. Offset the rasterized type on this new layer with the Move tool. Move this layer underneath the artwork layer. This makes your offeset drop shadow. You can color your drop shadow black, or white, or any other color, using the Color palette. I made mine black.

Next, I made another offset drop shadow layer, but this time I made this type layer white. Then I applied the Chrome filter to make silvered and chromed insets. I adjusted the position on the two drop shadows, one chromed, one black, to create the final effect of a three-dimensional type look, as shown here.



One of the new short films I am working on is based on video and stills from one of my favorite places in North America, Latourell Falls in Oregon. I am making a more experimental film, using multiframe compositions, mixing multiple shots of the same scene in different frames. So I wanted to include one of the waterfall images in the titling art. This is one of the ideas I am playing with. It's not in final form yet, however it does show off the type-art technique.



Another variation, this time using a B&W image of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming. I plan to do a couple of short films around this theme, one of them a B&W fine-art video, very much in the footsteps of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. The other short film will be based around images of several mountain ranges in winter. Again, this example is not a finished piece, just a work in progress. Nonetheless it shows off the possibilities available with this type-art technique.

Composition of the art within the type outlines is important, as well. When you art creating your layer mask to create the art within the type outlines, try moving your selection around to make the best use of the composition of the photographic image. Composition within the "box" the type outlines is what makes or breaks this effectiveness of this type-art technique.

Here's a tip: Since I do my video editing in Sony Vegas, the best tool I know of for this kind of job, I save the type art projects as unflattened PSD files. This preserves the "empty" or transparent pixels of the art, so they remain transparent when you import them into the video mixing project. If you flatten the image, all the background pixels default to the color you have selected as your background color, and are no longer transparent. Keeping the background transparent allows one to superimpose the type art over another layer in the final video mix.

The last step, when I have the final type-art made and imported into the video project later, will be to animate the type-art within the video frame for the title sequence. I will probably do a zoom or pan effect on this type-art piece, rather than statically fade it in and out again. I like moving type. It makes a title or caption a lot more dynamic and interesting to the viewing eye. That's a matter of taste, though, so feel free to follow your own instincts.

A Poster for Poetry Month

Every April in the USA is National Poetry Month. Nobody really cares about this, or even notices it, except poets, academics, and English teachers. There is usually a flurry of commemorations, both analytic and creative. it's not uncommon to see poetry workshops challenge their participants to write a poem a day for the duration of Poetry Month. Some public consciousness of poetry is indeed raised during the annual festivities, but then it sinks back below the public consciousness once the month is over. After all, April contains other, more urgent annual events, such as the day every year by which one must file one's income tax return. Poets struggle hard during April to raise the public consciousness of poetry, and the discourse around poetry. Overeager poetry literary-critical cheerleading spouted by poets during the month ranges from bland analysis to hysterical hand-wringing about the state of poetry nowadays. It must be said, one feels, that it's only because poetry is suffering public indifference and disinterest, most of the time, that it needs an annual bout of boosterism.

I am not big on boosterism. However, just for fun, last night I made a couple of flyers or posters, incorporating word-clouds made using Wordle, that are celebrations and/or announcements regarding National Poetry Month. These were design ideas that were sparked by running across various celebratory boosts in the literary world. I thought about all the earnestness, and decided one needs to also encounter some playfulness.

I find myself getting into trouble, again, for not obeying the rules that many poets impose on their own practice, and would like me to follow as well. I find myself once again indifferent to the definitional boundaries between poem, prose-poem, and poetic prose. I frequently pass across those boundaries, within a single piece, without taking any notice. This offends poets who wish to keep the definitions and boundaries intact and pure.

One of the reasons I like Wordle is that it makes words into visual art. There are rhythms within the visual forms that Wordle creates from your poem, essay, or random journal entry. This takes poems into a realm in which a poem's meaning can get decentered, while at the same time creating something like an illustrated poem, a haiga, an illuminated manuscript. The words lose context and syntax, although how they become juxtaposed can create fresh linkages between words. I appreciate how a word-cloud can then become part of a larger collaged image, adding layers of experiential communication to to a ohoto or illustration. Words and image can sometimes synergize into a greater whole.

In other words: Design and illustration wherein word-clouds are just another visual element, although naturally some linguistic meaning will accrue.

So, just for fun, I made a couple of versions of a poster or flyer for National Poetry Month, using my photography and poems.

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Let's start with the poetry element. Here are three word-clouds based on my poem Needles.





Wordle's sorting algorithm for creating word-clouds from texts sorts frequency against size. Thus, the more often a word appears in a text, the larger it is in the cloud. Position is randomized, disconnecting meanings.

Here's a couple more word-clouds, made from my poem Letter to ____.




And here's a word-cloud made from my poem Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across North America.



These examples give, I hope, an idea of the range that Wordle has within its operational parameters.

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That last Whitman-based word-cloud ends up in the poster I designed:


(Click on image for larger view.)

And here is a different version of the poster, in which the most obvious design change is the background color.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I'm also thinking of re-photographing these poetry posters in conjunction with one of my antique typewriters, to add another layer of writerly and design interest.

My own spin on a poster for National Poetry Month was to take a marginalized poetic subculture rarely represented during the annual celebration, and foreground it. A poetic subculture, I might add, that I care deeply about personally, but which the poetic mainstream rarely has time for. I'm referring to openly gay and lesbian poetry.

So I chose a photograph of mine, with a nude model at the Pacific Ocean. The word-clouds are made from two or three of my own poems with homoerotic themes, including the Whitman poem mentioned above.

I wonder if anyone would notice, if I didn't point it out.

They'd certainly see Whitman's name in there—but then, Whitman is considered a universal poet nowadays; a lot of Whitman criticism outright ignores the homoerotic aspects of the sexualities presented in his poetry. Unless one deliberately foregrounds the "Calamus" poems from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, plenty of scholarly critics and poets are happy to overlook Whitman's open homoeroticism. The usual argument goes: "After all, we're trying to raise the public consciousness of poetry, here, so we don't want to muddy the waters by emphasizing controversial subject matter!" Exclusion of such "controversial" subject matter is merely the most subtly pernicious form of censorship by the poetry mainstream. Whatever makes them squirm is to be avoided—which is paradoxical, since the deliberate obscurity, disjunction, and obliqueness that is currently fashionable in much contemporary poetry is exactly what makes many general (no-poetry-specialist) readers squirm.

I might revisit this poster design concept later, perhaps, using the "Calamus" poems as my source texts. That could make for an interesting take on this poster concept, particularly if I also include in the collage a portrait or two of Whitman, and more of my own homoerotic photography. Maybe later.

Papier-Mache Art Bowls 8: Further Experiments

A mixed bag produced this past week, with some mixed feelings. Not every piece came out as well as I'd hoped.



This time out, I tried using a little more glue in the papier-maché matrix of white glue and water. I am still trying to find the exact right proportions of glue and water—and frankly doing it by feel and eye rather than measuring cups—and I think I may have erred on the side of too much glue this time out. I'll show the results of this possible error, below.

I made this group of decorative papier-maché bowls early enough in the afternoon, on a warm day, that I was able to put them in the sunlight to dry for part of the afternoon. Drying them in the sunlight made for good results with the black paper bowls, but the other bowls still needed to dry out overnight.


Black Bowl and Vase

These two black bowls, or rather bowl and vase combination group, came out fine. They are a reproduction in heavy black torn paper of the bowl and vase I had made earlier out of a similar weight of torn purple paper. (I have since gifted the original purple bowl and vase to a friend.) I am now contemplating doing a series of bowl and vase combos, like these, in a rainbow of colors, as a set. It could be an interesting large set, with possibilities for arrangement and display in various groupings.



I think the particular success of these combos is the vase, which, if you put some small stones in the base, is very stable and doesn't tip over. I imagine one could put small stones in the accompanying bowl as well, and put dried flowers or some similar decorative touch in both, and use them as a designer centerpiece. The unique aspect of such a decorative set, of course, is that you made the containers, as well as the arrangement. There are several possibilities here yet to be explored.

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For another new group of decorative papier-maché bowls, what I experimented with was making an original illustrated paper to use. I have been experimenting already with making bowls illustrated with my paper prints of my own photographs—for example, the Stone Circle Nest Bowl—but I've been using existing prints from my back catalogue. This time out, I wanted to try creating a paper specifically intended for making into a papier-maché project.


Crocus flowers, Beloit, March 2011

This photograph of blooming crocus is my personal favorite photo, and possibly best photo, this year so far from my garden. Since spring was in the air, I decided to use this image as the basis and inspiration for a larger, designed art bowl.

So I took the crocus photo and ran it through Photoshop, creating a distressed-paper look that I intended to appear, when finished, like hand-made paper incorporating the flowers into its texture. It's an illusion made entirely in Photoshop, of course, but it looks like some of the handmade papers one can find at fine paper stores such as Hollander's, that mecca of book design and decorative papers in Ann Arbor, and that was my intent. Here is the result of this paper-imaging experiment:



I then laser-printed several sheets of this designed paper, and used it to make the larger bowl I had envisioned. I had enough left over to also make a smaller, square bowl.


Crocus Paper Bowls

Both bowls use the Crocus Paper on the exterior, leaving the interior plain. I envision these bowls being used as containers for cut flowers, later this spring, as part of a decorative table display.


Crocus Paper Bowl II

This is the smaller of the two Crocus bowls, and perhaps the more successful. The problem I mentioned with the glue earlier is visible here, on the bottom of the bowl. There was so much glue in the matrix, that the two Crocus Bowls took a long time to dry, and when I pulled them from the mold, each was mottled on the bottom. Imprints from the plastic wrap I use to line to molds were clear in the base, making for a roughened texture I hadn't anticipated. That isn't so visible here, in this photo, but one can still feel the wrinkled texture. What is visible here is the shiny, almost plastic-coated appearance of the base of the bowl, after the bowl had completely dried. It actually looks okay on this smaller of the two bowls. It might also make the bowls slightly more waterproof.


Crocus Paper Bowl I

The larger bowl, approximately nine inches in diameter, had similar issues with extended drying time, wrinkled texture caused by the glue, and shiny appearance. In addition, the plastic wrap tore the paper in a couple spots when I removed the bowl from the mold, leaving a couple of visible imperfections. Maybe it's just my perfectionism striking a muted tone against my expectations, but I was a little disappointed with the end result here. It looks better in the photo than it does in the hand, to be honest. it doesn't look bad, it just wasn't quite as good as I had envisioned.

As a technical point, you can see from the group photo above that I lined the inside of the larger Crocus Bowl with black paper. This is the same heavy black paper that I used for the bowl and vase combo above. Inside this larger bowl, I made a spiral of small black triangles that spin out from the center and halfway up the wall. This was done mostly for structural support, to give the bowl some extra heft. As a structural element it's quite successful; as a design element, less so. The spiral itself looks pretty good, reminding one of organic plant forms, but the black paper darkens the bowl's appearance from the outside, because the printed Crocus Paper is not completely opaque. Fortunately, the black interior will be mostly unseen when the bowl is filled with objects, for example cut flowers. I think that next time I try this structural support idea inside a bowl I will use either more complementary-colored paper, or pure white watercolor paper. That will give a lot of strength without color-shifting the bowl's appearance.

So, these were experiments with, in my opinion, mixed results. In some ways, the purely black bowl and vase are the most satisfying pieces this time out, because of their simple purity of color and design. The Crocus Paper bowls were an experiment in making an illustrated image bowl, with more mixed results. I've learned from the process, though, and will probably try to make better objects later using this same Crocus Paper. What I think works here is the original design and illustration, the concept of custom-making an image intended to be made into papier-maché. The execution was not as good as I had envisioned, however, and I'll do better next time, having learned from my errors.

I readily admit that this is the artist's expectations in play, here, and others may find these "imperfect" objects to be beautiful and pleasing just as they are. When you're experimenting, you have to expect a few "mistakes" and "failures" to occur, as an artist. Then you learn from the process, get better at what you're doing, and experiment anew. No artist ever gets it right every time—and the audience almost never gets to see the mistakes made during the creative process, or the process of learning to work with new materials. I'm being pretty open about my feelings about my art, here, as a way of both recording my learning process, for myself, and as a way of passing on what I've discovered along the way. Thus, I'm documenting the process as much as the results.

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As a lagniappe, I am offering for download, for free, the original full-resolution print-size JPG version of this Crocus Paper here. (Just use your usual browser download procedure to download the JPG file to your desktop.) You can use this as a stock image for a poster or other piece, or for your own papier-maché projects, or even as your computer screen backdrop. Please, if you do use this Crocus Paper image for a project you've designed and/or illustrated, send me a JPG of your work, just for my own pleasure. I always enjoy seeing what people come up with. Thank you.

Papier-Mache Art 4: Some Experimental Variations

This current set of papier-maché art pieces was frankly experimental. I tried out a few ideas I'd been thinking about, with mixed results. But it leads me to think in new directions, and even the "failures" from this session have given me fertile ideas for future art-pieces.



A papier-maché bowl made from full, untorn sheets of Japanese origami paper. I used most of an origami packet for this bowl, about 7 or 8 sheets total, all decorated in traditional Japanese blue-and-white textile patterns, from the sort of cheap cotton clothing worn by peasant field workers and fisherfolk.

I decided to see what would happen if I did a bowl out of whole sheets of thin decorated paper. I happen to have a lot of origami paper on hand, which I mostly like because of the way such papers are illustrated and decorated. I get design inspiration from some of these patterns. I do a little origami, but I'm not very practiced at it, and not very good.

Visually I like this bowl very much. Because it's whole sheets, rather than torn or cut strips, there are folds and ripples in the fabric of the bowl. It's a little thick, a little unwieldy. So the shape is a little amorphous, a little weird. It was an interesting experiment, though. I think I might try another origami bowl later, but with the sheets cut into strips. You can still create a field of visual pattern like on the origami paper, but without the folding and rippling effect in the paper itself.



A second bowl made during this experimental session consists of torn strips from laser-printed illustration resumés I printed some years ago. I had made this illustrated resumé as a marketing piece for my design and illustration work; it consisted of a collage of several of my Photoshop art pieces, along with name and address. To make this bowl, I tore up several of these sheets, discarding the address texts, and layered the torn sections inside and out. I tore along a straight-edge, creating a deckled paper edge kind of look, but making clean edges that preserve the images. So this uses the images on that old resumé piece to make a bowl. Since I chose visionary art for that piece, the images on the bowl remain remarkably coherent in affect. The look and feel is coherent. So I think this bowl is successful as an art piece, even though it's 100 percent recycled older art.

And now for something completely different:



For this, I used a brownie baking pan I got at the dollar store. I've found several plastic bowls and serving trays and pans that will serve me as papier-maché form molds at the dollar store. I'll be experimenting with more of those soon.

Meanwhile, in this cake pan I had the idea of making a paper matrix that might serve as a deckled frame for other art. I think this idea has real possibilities, for mounting photographs within shadow-box style paper frames, for example.

I used two images I had made some time ago in Photoshop, orphans of the Spiral Dance series of visionary art, that probably won't make it into the final version of the series. But these two work well side by side, and make up a more unified piece. So this paper-matrix framed two-image piece is a new piece of art in its own right; I'm thinking of a title for it, and I'll probably actual sign and title it later on.

This experiment is only partially successful, structurally. As it dried, it warped, and was no longer flat. But I solved that with foamcore backing. I have some foamcore, bought at an art supply store, that has adhesive on one side; the idea being to mount art permanently on the foamcore, after which it could then be framed or matted or whatever. I mounted this piece on a sheet of the adhesive foamcore, which flattened it out and also raised the edges more into a box shape, more like a frame with depth to it. And with the foamcore backing giving it structural solidity, it now looks more like the unified piece I had intended; and it will possible to mount it on the wall, now, as a finished piece.



The reason the paper warped here, I believe, is that I used too light a weight of paper. A heavier, more bonded paper, like a medium-weight watercolor paper, might be less likely to warp upon drying. This paper was also too light when soaked in the papier-maché glue medium; it actually tore a couple of times when I was laying it down in the mold. So I'll use a heavier paper next time, to see what happens. White cardstock might actually make a good matrix medium for this kind of papier-maché frame.

Another thought, about the art to be put inside the frame. I am thinking I could mount a pure photo directly in the center of this kind of frame. But I could also do collage. Both by tearing and reassembling a single image into a collage, but also by making several adjoining images separately, and putting them together in collage form. David hockney has done this with Polaroids and other photos, in very interesting ways, that I have found inspirational. I actually thoght of doing this kind of photo-collage in this papier-maché frame first, but I decided for this initial experiment to just use whole images, albeit with torn edges, just to see how they would look.

I don't think this experiment was a total success; although I was able to "repair" it using adhesive foamcore, as a I said above. I've learned a couple of things already from the attempt, however, and will try to take it to a more finished level on my next attempt.

Meanwhile, we keep experimenting, and seeing what happens. I'm still learning the materials, too, after all.

Teton Windows

Teton Windows
(Click on image for larger version.)

A collage made from two photos of the Tetons, made by improvising in Photoshop till inspiration struck. This piece is thematically tied to the series of Ocean Windows and Sunset Windows pieces also made in Photoshop.

Each piece in this series is made of two or mote layers of photos of the same setting or subject, with "windows" in the upper layers masked out to reveal what lies beneath. There is an apparently Cubist aspect to this collage method, with multiple viewpoints of the subject within the frame; but for me the visionary art aspect is more important, with each of the multiple viewpoints being a window or door one sees through into another aspect of the scene, or into another world entirely.

On one level, my inspiration here is from contemporary stained-glass windows in cathedrals. These collages evoke standing inside Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, for example, the stained glass illuminated from outside, flooding the walls and floor with colored patterns of light, the sacredness of the space created as much by this illumination as by any conventional religious association. I plan to print some of these "windows" pieces large, and hang them so that they in turn evoke the feeling of cathedral windows.

Visionary Artwork 5

Going back through some older archives, looking at some early visionary Photoshop work, I pulled out a few pieces to make fresh prints of. It's good to look back on the work you did some years ago, to reflect on the process and how it's changed. And how you have changed.

It's interesting to look back over some of this old work, at the moment, as I proceed forward into a new phase of productivity, in art-making and music composition.


Prince of Air (c. 2000)

A piece made for a proposed Tarot deck, actually more of a Jungian archetype deck. A friend modeled for me at the lake, and I assembled this from several sequential poses and images. The feeling I had, as I played with the images, was of that of a man leaping into the air and flying. It was definitely a leap, not just floating up. So I represented the upward take-off as sequential and layered images, with wings on the sides. The side panels are Art Nouveau angels from a decorative clip art book.

This version of the piece, printed and framed at 8 inches square, has been shown in a number of group exhibitions in the Midwest. It was this square version that I stumbled across when browsing through my old archives that made me think to think make a new print edition.



This version was the one that I actually made for the proposed deck of cards. I still work on this deck from time to time, although I still haven't found a publisher for it. There are some 48 or so finished images, with several more still in progress, and a dozen or so images I made that I've decided not to include.

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Gambuh

A self-portrait taken in Surakarta, Central Java, c. 1985. This was taken in the living room of the house I rented. I was dressed in traditional Javanese court garb, and playing a Balinese bamboo flute called a suling gambuh, suling meaning flute, gambuh being an ensemble composed of pairs of these long low-pitched suling played using circular breathing technique.

I don't do a lot of self-portraits, but occasionally as an artist, you need to. Just to see where you're at, to locate yourself in your work. A form of artistic self-assessment, if you will. At this moment, I was studying traditional Javanese court gamelan in Surakarta, on a Fulbright grant. I was studying as a composer rather than as an ethnomusicologist at the time, although of course those interests converged at times.


Gambuh Sunset

In the early 90s, I combined this self-portrait with an image of a winter sunset taken overlooking Lake Mendota in Madison, WI. The pink, orange and red sunlight reflected on the ice of the frozen lake, haloed the trees, and spread across the sky. When I combined the layers I did some dodging and burning, and some masking of parts of each image, so that the elements I wanted to have appear were clarified. For example, I created an oval vignette around myself playing the suling, so that face and hands and flute would not be lost in the trees of the sunset image.

One thing I like about this image is that it combines two climate zones and locations that have been important in my life. It combines the tropical heat of equatorial Indonesia with the frozen sub-arctic tundra of the northern Midwest, my birth home. Some 45 degrees of latitude and nearly 180 degrees of longitude separate the two locales in which the separate images were made. To combine these images like this represents my life's history in microcosm. So this piece is symbolic, for me, of how big parts of my life have merged.


Chamber Music CD cover (1995)

In 1995 I produced and released a CD of some of my composed chamber music. The album had five pieces on it, which I had digitized from the original performance recordings, all originally recorded on stereo reel-to-reel tape.

To make the cover art I re-versioned the Gambuh Sunset piece. A lot of graphic design is re-versioning, when it is based on pieces that were originally stand-alone art pieces. I used two different typefaces for the Chamber Music titling, heavily modifying each word in Photoshop.

Using this self-portrait piece for the CD cover was actually to fulfill a request from a friend, who believed that people would want to knew who the artist was. I'm not big on author's photos on book covers, or composer's portraits on album covers, as I like to think the work can speak for itself. In this case I acceded to the request because I knew I could do something a little different with it, play with the image and type, make it new.

Stairway

Stairway

Every so often, browsing through my photo archives, an idea for an image comes to me, when a few elements start to come together in my mind. Even on roadtrips with planned subjects, I also shoot a lot of photos not as pure photos, but as stock images, or as elements for future Photoshop collages.

Every so often, when browsing through photo elements, an idea for a collage image comes to me. These are not really Surrealist images, but post-surrealist. They owe more to the influence of one of my favorite photographers, Jerry Uelsmann, who for many years has made post-surreal photo collages in his darkroom, working with many negatives and masks and exposures to create master prints of his visionary art. From the very beginning of my work with Photoshop, I began doing something similar, albeit in the primarily digital domain.

This piece, Stairway came together over the las few nights, as I was looking at recent photos. The river image is of Turtle Creek, my local beloved river. The stairs are from a mountainous city park in Portland, OR. The model is from an outdoors model shoot I did over a year ago.

I like the combined result for its synergy, the combined effect that creates something new out of the individual elements, taking the finished image in a direction none of the elements implied only by themselves. The river becomes a tiled path, perhaps, with a traveler walking along its surface. Or a wet pavement street, or waterway. The reflection of the stairs in the sky becomes perhaps a shelter, or another path entirely, or an echo of the basic forms.

Here's the original color image of Turtle Creek, that served as a base for this collage:



The idea of superimposing the stairs came along as I continued browsing through images. It seemed like a natural fit, and I worked fairly extensively to get the right positioning and layering effects to their final state. The model was almost an afterthought, but quickly became essential to the concept of the piece. I did create a new wave reflection of the person to superimpose over the water, and the stairs.

In making these photocollage images, I often end up working in B&W rather than color. That's partly because so many individual photo elements don't match up in color, due to lighting and location. But working in B&W is also partly about making a composition in unified tonal effects, with unified lighting and tones, which is easier to assemble in B&W. So, those are the technical reasons for working in B&W.

There are aesthetic reasons, as well. Partly the history of photography, not to mention gallery culture, still recognizes B&W images as more "fine art" than color images, most of the time. That bias is still present. More importantly, there is a pleasure in B&W imagery that is purely about shapes, compositions, forms, lighting, and sensuality. You are freed up in some ways to think outside the usual photographer's mental box, when you don't also have to deal with color.

There is something very sensual about B&W, a different kind of sensuality than color: more of artifice than reportage, more subject to creative mastery. B&W is inherently more artificial than a color snapshot—which is one reason it's taken to be more fine art than color, still—and as a more artificial artform, it shows the artifice, the conceptual toolmarks of the artist's imagination, visualization, and execution.

Another way of breaking out of photography's sensual box that I have been experimenting with lately is to convert a color image to B&W leaving only one key element in color. I find that monochrome color often works for this approach.

Rainforest Art from Photos

Images from Olympia, WA, February 2010

Two images from the temperate rainforest surrounding Puget Sound in the state of Washington, taken near Olympia. I drove up from Portland, where I was staying for a week near the end of my latest long winter roadtrip. I spent the day visiting my aunt who lives in Olympia. We had a nice meal at a restaurant overlooking the Olympia marina, then drove around the area to see the sights. I made some photos from the moving car, capturing what I could, as we drove around.

These two photos are a bit blurred by the motion of the car. But I liked the lines in them, the arrangements of the vine and moss covered trees, and the overall mood. So I chose to work with each image in Photoshop, using different techniques to create different kinds of effects. I am becoming more and more interested in making art from my images, leaving some as pure photos, but working with others to create more artistic effects.



This only slightly blurred image stood out because of the arrangement of trees, especially the gnarled shelf of ferns growing out of the foreground tree. I used an antiquing process and added vignettes to the corners to age the image, and hopefully give it a timeless feel.



For this image I accentuated the motion blur, then de-blurred the foreground tree, to create depth of field. Then I desaturated the color from the background, so that only the foreground tree is highlighted in color. I wanted to create a sense of the mysterious darkness of the rainforest in this image. The color elements are thus in contrast with the moody background, like life and shadow.

I've been experimenting from time to time with creating B&W images with just a few items picked out in color. (A technique that works better with some images than others.) The colored items are either in the color original, or hand-painted in with color in Photoshop. In this instance, which was originally a color image, I kept the central tree in color when I desaturated the background. I also darkened the overall image, to up the contrast and create a darker mood.

Visionary Artwork 4

A few notes on method.

As with poetry-writing, I don't find endless tinkering to be all that useful or important to the process of making visionary art. The more you tinker, the more you risk the image losing its power, and going stale and overly-familiar. Most often, I do my best to work quickly, as spontaneously as possible, so as not to over-think an artwork and possibly risk killing its energy.

There are two or three larger, overlapping impetuses towards making a new piece, which can be categorized roughly as:

1. inspired by dreams, and records of dreams
2. inspired by waking visions; things I see, and ways I see things, made in Photoshop so others can see them too
3. made by playing around with elements and techniques in Photoshop till something ignites and tells me what it wants to become

The first two categories contain spontaneous as well as more "planned" or "deliberate" pieces. Many of these pieces are deliberate attempts to recreate what one has seen, in a dream, in a waking vision, in the imagination. The intention is to bring into the visible realm what one has seen, so that others might see it too. It's a way of sharing your unique vision of the world with others.

These images are "planned" mainly in the sense that one has the image very quickly, and the rest of one's effort lies in the execution: going to find the elements needed; putting it together, like a painting, which can take some time; finishing it up and polishing it, making it come as close to the original vision as possible. Occasionally this yields very strong work, which acquires more energy when you complete it, and keeps growing. (Which certainly renews my faith in the importance of incorporating our dreams into life.) I practice keeping my analytical mind in check—keep the inner editor or critic turned off—for as long as possible, at least till the basic conception is done. I might spend considerable time on the technical execution, if drawing in Photoshop, or editing certain parts of an image becomes necessary.

The following piece was made immediately upon waking, after seeing, in the last dream before waking, this image of multiple moons above the road. The feeling in the dream was that the sky had opened up like a window or a gateway, revealing another world, another universe, another place and time:



The following image was made this way: a quick imaginative waking vision, I knew what I was going to do when I made the photo of the huge willow tree, followed by a lot of work in Photoshop to get everything to look right. The lighting effects alone took several layers to make look right:


Arrival, from Spiral Dance

In Photoshop, as in painting, subtlety goes a long way. Underpainting layers, layers with slightly different lighting effects and opacities, multiple repetitions of a layer each with a slightly different blur to add depth—these are all typical techniques one can use. I find in practice that using a lot of layers with subtle effects looks far more realistic, more like what the eye actually sees, no matter what the subject matter is. Remember that the camera eye sees more things, in sharper focus, than does the human eye. That's a property of photography that can be used to create super-realism and sharp depth of field; and since the real world is often fuzzy around the edges, it can be an effect we need to tone down, to give an image heart and breath.

The third category, above, actually accounts for over half of the visionary art I make. Sometimes I get inspired by an element of what becomes the final piece, which leads me to go looking for the rest, to pull it all together. Sometimes the mood of a basic photo inspires me in a certain direction, and seems to call for something specific to go along with it. Sometimes it's pure play, which ends up revealing something archetypal. Fooling around with one's art materials is a time-honored way of finding inspiration, which is really no different in Photoshop then it is with colored pencils on paper.

None of this is accidental or random, however. It's a kind of active imagination, to use Jung's term, that goes spelunking for the contents of one's unconscious, and translates them into imagery, poetry, dream-narrative, and other creative materials. One reason I like working with wood is that it retains the feeling of being alive; Jung worked often with stone.

Photoshop for me is a tool in which active imagination can happen; the key to active imagination is putting oneself into a meditative, receptive, numinous state, to await what is brought forward by the unconscious for you to examine. This is dream-logic, and the logic of the Dreamtime: it's not rational logic, and it's not a process of art-making in which the intellect is "in control" of the process, or even present. None of that artist's ego beforehand saying that it knows what it's going to do down to the last millimeter; it's more important to set out with no idea of what's going to happen. You actually have to get your ego-mind to "step aside," to get out of the way. The discipline is to create a field of receptivity in oneself, then wait to see what comes forward. You might end up with a doodle rather than finished piece—a risk you take anytime you play with your artistic tools—and you might find something that needs to sit and percolate awhile, before you come back to finish it. Or it might all come together suddenly and complete itself. All this is as true for poetry-writing as for making images.

There have been many times when, sorting through photos made recently, I run across one that hadn't left much of an impression on me before, but which now seems to be surrounded with a powerful, glowing aura of importance. It can stop me in my tracks. When that happens, I start working with the image, trying out different tools and techniques to see what might happen—very like a jazz player riffing on a theme, trying out different ways of improvising till something starts to take form. Improvisation in Photoshop can very much be a way to activate the imagination.

There have been other times when I knew the photo was going to be important as I was making it, because the moment of its making was surrounded by something liminal, something numinous and non-ordinary. You get a feeling, a sense that something important is going to happen, and you set up the camera then wait for the exact moment when your intuition tells you to release the shutter. You know what's going to happen before it actually does—or rather, not exactly what, but that something special is going to happen. Some people call that feeling a hunch; others call it intuition. If it's luck, it's not random luck, but the luck of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence when everything lines up just so, and sings.

This photo was made at one of those moments:



Sometimes, when you catch the light of spirit just right, just so, you want to jump up and down and yell "Yes! Yes!" to celebrate everything in the Universe converging, just so, to make the photo happen.

This leads me to mention a curious paradox: There have been numerous occasions when a viewer of my artwork thinks that a pure photo was manipulated in Photoshop, and when a heavily-worked image in Photoshop is taken to be a pure photo. The two processes are confused for one another; I grant that it's not always obvious. Yet that this confusion of means keeps happening is very interesting to me as the artist.

There is another, related paradox, too, in which someone sees something numinous and archetypal in an artwork which I myself view as fairly mundane; just as there are times in which I see a lot of liminal power in a finished piece that no one else seems to see. That line between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, wherein live the archetypes, is an apparently fuzzy and movable line.

I leave these paradoxes unexamined, without trying to force them towards a resolution. As the artist involved, I find it very interesting, and make note of it, without necessarily needing to force it towards intellectual understanding.