Commit Acts of Art Every day: Postcards

 "Not every act of art creates something special, but it does create something. It is the act of art that is important, not the result." Michael L. Goodman

I participated in a "stickerbomb" postcard trade this week on Swap-bot. The challenge was to cover the address sides of any three postcards and send them to your assigned trade partners. As fun as Swap-bot.com has been, I am afraid the site is in danger of  disappearing from the internet like MailArt365. It is almost impossible now to log on to the site and navigate to the various swaps without getting a error messages. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Commit Acts of Art: Bits and Pieces

 "One principle of collage is, you have to kill one thing to make another. It's a small-scale model of revolutionary behavior." Lucy Sante, collage artist, author, and critic.

 It is the "killing" of one thing, tearing or cutting an image, that is sometimes the difficult part of collage for me; especially if it is a piece of ephemera I have had for years or that belonged to someone no longer here. Then there is getting just the right piece glued down where it has to be - not tearing too much or leaving too much. And, what do you cover up with another scrap here, with a circle there, with a cut out "ransom-note word" here or another there. Behind it all: what am I trying to say, if anything.

Anyway, I have been working on 24 small collages for a few days while also making post cards for swapping. While rummaging for papers, I found some that I made almost twenty years ago. They are slick magazine pages that were treated with Citra-Sol causing the inks to run. After the wet pages were pressed together, interesting patterns emerged when the pages were pulled apart. I will use some of these in the collages I am working on.

Commit Acts of Art: Collage Again

 "Circles, like the soul, are never ending and turn round and round without a stop." Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have only been able to create bits and pieces of many unfinished collages this month. Here are two finished works on facing pages in my collage workbook, and two collage postcards made for Swap-Bot trades.

Door  5 1/2 " X 8 1/4 "

Moon Text  5 1/2 " X 8 1/4 "

I love the circle, the oval, and flowing free-form shapes. I use those shapes, especially the circle, in almost everything I create.

These postcards measure 5" X 7". I have my fingers crossed that they will survive the postal machinery and arrive unscathed.

Commit Acts of Art: Growing Collages

 "I work like a gardener ... Things come slowly ... Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. I must graft. I must water ... Ripening goes on in my mind. So I am always working on a great many things at the same time." Joan Miró

These are two collage experiments I grew yesterday afternoon and this morning. They are in my small collage journal and are 5½" X 8¼".

Commit Acts of Art: Une Petite Galerie de Collages

 "Art is a step in the known toward the unknown." Kahlil Gibran

I

This is a small gallery of some collages I cut and glued together in the mid 1980s. I rarely sign or date the work I do, which is only a problem for me when I want to remember when and where I created them. No one else cares one way or the other. When I pass on, my children and grandchildren will give them a fleeting glance as they discard them. But, I am saving them here on the blog for someone to discover. I can hear them now saying, "That guy is weird!"

Untitled, 6" X 7½" on mat board.

Winged Victory, 8½" X 11" on paper.

Défilé de Passage, 7" X 11" on paper.

Untitled, 9" X 12" on drawing paper

 II

These are a few of the thirty plus mini collages I cut and glued in 2018. They are all untitled, 4½" X 6½" on the backs of colored envelopes.

"Time is repetition, a circle. This is obvious. Day and night, the seasons, tell us this. Even so, we don't believe it." Joy Williams

Commit Acts of Art Every Day! 

Commit Acts of Art: Miscellaneous Wednesday

 "Visual memory is the second strongest after smell. Images connect culture, identity, and beliefs across millennia, generations, and continents." The COMPASS GALLERY

I sent out 11 letters last week, all in decorated envelopes. I have been creating 365 decorated envelopes each of the last five years. Well, I sometimes failed to finish the goal during each calendar year, but I did complete each goal. I am now in the middle of the sixth series of making 365 message containers, so I have a multitude of envelopes from which to choose when I send a letter, a thank you note, or a "Hello, how are you?" card.

I wanted to work on some collages this week, and I finally was able this afternoon to go down to my basement studio and do some tearing, cutting, and gluing. I rummaged through several containers of paper scraps, magazine pages, ink stained papers, gelli plate monoprints, and left over odds and ends  from past projects. It never fails when I start a project, that I get side tracked while looking through storage containers and finding unfinished projects, articles [such as the "Top 100 Western Movies of All Time"], and assorted ephemera to mull over. I found a few paper weavings I started playing with thirty years ago and never used for anything. All that exploring fritters away my limited committing art time! I should be able to use these weavings for something, but what?

Below is the collage I created today. I love circles. I hope I have not over done it on this piece. That is me in the middle as I was 73 years ago: a hot-shot cowboy! I have used that image on Artist Trading Cards. The thought just popped into my head: maybe all those little circles are gunshot holes.

Commit Acts of Art Every Day!

Enveloping the Word: Book and Magazine Page Envelopes

 I took a page from an old, oversized art book showing photographs of a modern art piece and, using a template, cut out an envelope. I used a black fine-point Sharpie to outline some shapes and added tiny marks around them. I had a good time listening to a Russian army band rendition of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor [one of my all time favorite Bach pieces in any instrumentation] while I was working. After I folded the envelope, I added a few little embellishments and called it good.

The cut page from the art book.

I enjoy taking pages from discarded art books and various magazines and making envelopes out of them. I use the envelopes to send letters to my grandchildren and other relatives and friends. They always know they have a letter from me when they see the envelope in the box.

An envelope made from a magazine page with a few embellishments.

This is not great art, but it is my art. It is not as avant-garde as Ray Johnson's mail art and his New York Correspondance [sic] School members. I wish I had known about the growing mail art community in the early 1960s when I was an art student, before life took me in a different direction. I believe my first art teacher and mentor, Floyd V. Cornaby, would have loved it. It was much cheaper to mail letters back then, too! First-class postage in 1965 was five cents.

Commit Acts of Art Every Day!