Psalm 103 (draft 1)

(draft 1)

Today's posting is the first draft which is centered around Psalm 103. The first verse is a well known chorus and sung throughout many churches. It reads....."Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name." I hope you enjoy watching the process of how it comes together.

It still feels very awkward for me to post things that are incomplete, but the response has been enthusiastic and apparently helpful, so I will put aside my feelings and carry on. The truth of the matter is that I cannot create small works for posting and also have the time and energy to do larger pieces as well. Having said that, I have already determined that this piece will be a 6" x 12" with a horizontal orientation. Which means that by tomorrow, you will see a lot of this background cropped. And there will still be some sections left for at least one 6" x 6".

What you see laying on top of the text pages is a 6" length of kiln formed glass with letters fused into the glass. So in this case, the length of the glass determined the size of the piece since I strongly believe that with few exceptions, the glass inclusion needs to go from edge to edge, especially when combined with mixed media. Since the glass has a tremendous amount of detail, my plan is to include plain rice papers and mono printed rice papers that have very little detail or none at all. This will also allow me to layer some lettering in those areas and include some that is free and expressive. It is crucial to keep the areas free of detail when included other elements with tons of detail.

My support for this piece is a section of 300 lb HP Watercolor Paper with (2) coats of black gesso. You can see that I left slivers of the black showing through to create some erratic lines which give rhythm to the piece. The old text pages were then cut or torn and adhered to the support with gel matte medium. By laying the text page on a section of wax paper and applying the medium with a palette knife, you will have less chance of your text adhering to whatever else you might have considered to lay it on. (i.e....Old telephone directories or newspapers have printed matter that could stick to your text page. Wax paper resolves that issue. This is especially important when adhereing rice papers which are much thinner and will stick to other materials.)

So now that the text pages are adhered, I will let it dry thoroughly and at some point during the day, I will add my rice papers. I may even consider added some metallic leaf. My first step, however, will be the decision to crop what you see posted today. Then I will have a better idea of what to do next. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.

"Balancing Details"

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"Balancing details is an art." If there are too many details in life or in art, there is overload. However, if there are no details in life or in art, there is boredom and very little substance. It's a delicate balance.

As you can plainly see, I have been experimenting with design and collage. And details are very important when creating a collage. The most important thing to realize is that the eye is constantly looking for connections. And if the connections don't make sense, the viewer is unable to stay engaged in your art.

It is also possible to have a lot of detail, but not enough contrast, and then the viewer cannot distinguish any connections and there is no place for the eye to rest. The secret is to keep significant sections free of detail so that the viewer's eye goes right to the focal point or even several areas that have strong enough connections to be focal points.

And the beauty of collage is that you can completely gesso over a particular section and replace the collage piece with something more convincing. I did that very thing yesterday on a large piece that had too many jolts of color. So I eliminated one color altogether and substituted another to change the mood of the piece.

In the posting today. there is ample white or very light lavendar sections that have little or no detail. And the placement of the red pieces provides a very loose frame around the one piece of detail. In conclusion, the attention to how much or how little detail is a very important design decision. And it's quite okay to have very intense color combinations with some detail as long as there are significant sections of white or very little color and also some punches of very dark color. Within this framework, you can have a very successful collage. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.