Fresh start

I am back at it and starting fresh. Though I am attempting to maintain a similar feel and style to the "Sea" piece, the subject matter has changed to trees and and palette to  green and gold.  I began by layering strips of fabrics in various  green hues, slashing through them to create texture, felting them down and then adding wools and the wool roving or "dog fur" as I fondly refer to it! The natural coloured wool roving softens the greens and creates a woven appearance. 

I am constantly breaking  needles with this felting process even though this time I am taking care to felt only a thin layer of fabrics and wools.  I might rethink the process again when I have finished these pieces to reduce the amount of felting required. The needles cost $14 for 6, a bit pricey to break on a regular basis.

This time I will work hard  to not as they say "over work this piece!"  Deciding when to stop is always a challenge when creating any kind of art. It is very easy to go too far and lose the freshness and charm.

Anyway, I am posting photos of two pieces along with the previous "Sea" piece for comparison.  The first photo also includes a selection of fabric paints, Shiva oilsticks , threads and beads I am considering for addition later. At this point each piece measures 14" x18" without a border.

 

Dead ends, Detours and Play

Sometimes you just get  detoured off the main road, possibly to a dead end.  These photos illustrate my detour into a folksy, cutesy direction with two of the pieces. I rescued the last piece before I completely lost my bearings!  Perhaps I just needed to get that out of my system before moving forward.  This really is the value of play, to be able to explore different possibilities  and just see where your imagination takes you. Funny how an image will appear seemingly out of nowhere. 

Anyone old enough to remember the stories by Thornton W. Burgess such as The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat or Reddy Fox will recognize Old Mother West Wind and Mr. Sun as characters from his children's stories.  I have a special fondness for Folk Art and these pieces demonstrate this love. 

Both pieces are heavily felted giving them lots of body but making it more difficult to add decorative stitching. I have discovered that it is best to limit the felting to the base layers only and then use the regular sewing machine to apply other wools and fabrics later. The felting process destroys the fabric  and a new base layer must be added so the sewing threads have something to catch onto.  At this point I am going to put them aside and return to a simpler more abstract vision. I have one of the original three pieces to work with and am planning on creating three more in a similar style.

Perhaps in retrospect I should have resisted my urge to play but I think I needed to give in to a bit of silliness and  explore different avenues of expression. As my children will attest to, I am a little crazy about mazes, particularly corn mazes in the fall, and enjoy  following a new route even if it leads to a dead end!

Progression

Initial broad strokes of colour have been replaced by a more refined layering of fabrics and wools to show a gradation of sand and water.  The wool roving I have used for the sand almost looks like dog fur when it has been felted with other materials.  This creates  interesting possibilities for future work. Woof! Woof!

The land in the background has been depicted in a simple abstract style as a contrast to the more textured foreground.

Having cannibalized one piece for materials to use with the  others, I am only working on three pieces now.  I suppose it is a bit like eating your young!  Quite acceptable in the world of collage. 

I have been working indiscriminately back and forth  between the different pieces- sometimes one becomes a favourite but then loses out to  new  excitement about possibilities in an other.  Again, a silly correlation  to parenting, but somehow working in a series like this enables me to switch my focus between the different pieces and still create a cohesive grouping.  When I am stuck on one piece it helps to direct my energies elsewhere for awhile.

The photos have become a starting point for some compositional elements such as broad areas of light vs dark and colour choices but I am  not bound to striving for any particular degree of realism.  They are merely to inspire! What more can I ask of nature.