looking for lake
ALT: water soluble graphite and crayon, abstract landscape. mostly horizontal drifting lines across the page; blue below, as if rippled water, and orange above as if sunset in a periwinkle sky, with purple hills between.
collage #7 for 2026.
I expect this will be the last one for this round; i have tidied up my work bench and put away all the little scraps of pictures.
These collages assemble themselves from scraps and leftovers from the Feb (or March) collage party. lots of art magazines and National Geographicses. some of the bits here have been kicking around for years, some are scraps from collages made by other artists in my studio this year. I choose and place by visual intuition, no grand idea, yet often a mood emerges.
ALT: magazine picture collage. the background is the interior of an old and rubble-filled church (Turkish, if I remember correctly). there’s a man walking through it. he is surrounded by bits from a painting found in an art magazine, that have a flooded house and two people reaching upward, in this context, from windows of the church. There are also some bits from a Bosch painting, and a couple of odd creatures from National Geographics, including a man having a stare-down with an emperor penguin across the rubble.
collage #6 for 2026, it took me a long time to get around to gluing this one down. It’s a photo of Paris, with round cutouts that frame assorted images of animals, people, and scenes. this all sits on a ground made of collaged bits of an old line drawn map of Paris that once decorated a standing screen that I had to strip and repaint to get it back into use.
hopeseed
ALT: ink and crayon drawing, an egg (brown) with a loosely tied green ribbon looped around it, on an orange stripe that sits upon blue lines like water
big dreams
ALT: pencil drawing, abstract. four little beans at the bottom of the page, each with a succession of ever larger and more complex shapes behind it up to the top, filling up the page.
what we keep, and what we cannot
ALT: water soluble graphite and crayon. a coiled nest of brambles, and a line of 5 winged red shapes below, within, and escaping into the clear air above. just learned of an old friend gone into hospice, and at my age I guess I’d better start getting used to hearing this kind of news. sigh.
flightbutt
ALT: crayon drawing , the backside of a bird with wide wingspan stretching beyond the paper’s edges, soaring over rolling hills, toward the blue beyond. there are also clouds and a crescent moon.
succession of blooms
ALT: water soluble crayon drawing that shows a purple flower blooming on a long stem, and a pink one enclosed in a green and blue circle, next to a warm, sunny egg of a shape, cradled in green curves. below there’s a horizontal blue strip you could read as water if you wanted to, and a brown shape like a rock or patch of fertile soil.
trick rider
ALT: crayon drawing., sort of abstract expression. it’s a purple horse, with someone standing on it with one foot in the air. background orange and green.
clearing brush
ALT: water soluble graphite and crayon. two angled shapes that look somewhere between arms and boomerangs, face each other on a field of tall grass. maybe they are parting a path through. I spent the earlier part of the evening pruning bushes and moving brush piles, if that helps any with the explanation.
eyespider 