Lately I have been having a lot of fun with collages made by cutting up paintings and pasting the pieces onto other paintings. When I cut a watercolor into strips of various sizes and rearrange the strips, something changes to create an energized painting. Pondering why this should be so, I came up with several ideas. Using a musical analogy, one reason that the slicing and dicing works so well is that a new syncopated rhythm is injected into the work. Some “beats” or parts of shapes are dropped and others receive a greater or lesser emphasis than in the old painting. The completed work has a revitalized tempo while still retaining some aspects of the original works.
This Saturday I am looking forward to teaching my technique at the Daniel Smith store in Redmond (see “events” for information). The process itself is like play and there is always a surprise factor because I am never sure just how the collage is going to look when completed. The watercolor/collage above entitled “Mythical” resulted from 2 paintings of a town in the Cinque Terre region of Italy.
KC