"Poetic Verse"

(image 1)

(image 2)

(unavailalbe....6" x 6".....mixed media on gessobord)

"Poetic verse is music in my soul." All of the readable text pages in this piece are from The Soul's Traveller by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I am quite fond of her work and found an old volume in an antique store. Many of those text pages have appeared in my work.

I really wanted to showcase the gestural writing in the red/orange paper, but also wanted to ground it with a dark neutral. My preferred neutral is black. Another reason for choosing black is to create a good integration with the text pages.

I laid my chosen red/orange print on a 6" x 6" gessobord and cut out the three rectangular areas. That is what you see in image one. The reason I didn't just adhere the black print over the red/orange is because of the translucency. Instead, I chose to adhere text in those white rectangles to be seen through the black print.

You will notice that the red/orange touches all sides of the design space so that the gestural writing would be going edge to edge. I didn't want to interrupt the flow of that line. Additional text was then added underneath the black areas and also around some of the outside edges. This further integrated these two areas together.

The design "take away" from combining two disparate parts is to make sure there are some common denominators. In this case, gestural writing or mark making is taking place in both prints and text is under the black print and on top of the red/orange print.

Also notice that two of the rectangles are in the corners...another good place to add a paper. None of the corners are the same and that is always a good thing. In an odd way, I ended up framing the gestural writing that drew me in by placing the black printed areas around the edges. And of course, black and white plus one other color works every time it's tried. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.