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.
2026 collage #5, still mining that Bosch painting for hands, monsters, and general vibe
ALT: magazine picture collage featuring parts of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, some animals from National Geographic magazine, and a nun oddly raising a knife towards the clouds in a painted sky.
ALT: magazine picture collage featuring a reclining nude lady and a resurrected Christ, on a backdrop of stonework and macroscopically photographed jellyfish. It’s very red and brown.
ALT: magazine picture collage featuring two praying mantises in very dancerly poses, with the torso of a young human in the background. The human was photographed holding a bunch of flowers, but one of the mantises blocked out that view. The flowers ended up as part of Collage #2.
ALT: collage of magazine pictures. a grid of 9 boxes, with the shapes of a hand in various positions cut out. in the negative space, faces or pieces of faces, not all of them human. all on a textured green ground, and on the right edge a strip of landscape that is the edge of meadow and forest.
I mostly worked on collages this day. Here is a gallery of where the 2026 batch is at.
2026 collage #2 : current state nearly done.2026 collage #2: in progress, nothing glued down yet.2026 collage #3: current state – nothing glued down yet, but I think the layout is nearly done2026 collage #3: earlier phase. A bit of collage #1 visible to the left.2026 collage #4 in progress. Early stage of collage #1 on the right.2026 collage #4 current state. This might be done but for the gluing.2026 collage #1, just in case you missed my post a couple days ago. This one is all done and ready to mount or frame.
I finally glued down the first of the collages I started to lay out in March. I think my practical collaging technique is getting better; this one is flat and everything is well glued down.
ALT: collage of magazine pictures, dominated by a sort of gargoyle with a belligerent frog climbing out it’s mouth, and flanked by a bosch club-wielding bird of prey. these images emerge out of a background of brown leaves and blue-green waters.
ALT: abstract, with glued bits of yarn and thread, and pooled ink. the image could be seen as a purple doggish critter, ears upraised and head turned as if in sudden movement. or you might see something completely different, or nothing at all but swoops of line and color.
As the season moves toward spring, and green buds and shoots are starting to brave the world, we had a snowfall here, nearly an inch. It all melted very fast, but a reminder how early spring so often is a dance between the cold and the warm, intertwined in a way that is quite lovely though sometimes inconvenient.
Since I’ve been obsessed with making little stars and flowers from yarn woven onto pipe-cleaner frames (“darn stars”), my work table it covered with fiber scraps. perhaps inevitable that some would eventually get glued down to a page.
ALT: ink and fiber, abstract. perhaps a glass vase on the right, and leaning over it a branch with no leaves, but maybe watery and fibrous … flowers?
eyespider 