One thing leads to another…or being led by your love of subject matter

I guess it started out with this large collage.

 I am always on the lookout for texts/books with a natural history slant, and a particularly fruitful visit to the Kane county flea market garnered me quite a few treasures…  so I started out with a collage from parts of an antique birding book, then thought perhaps I could use those wing diagrams that I found years ago, so I dug them up and made a silkscreen of them and included those as well. And that lead me to thinking of nests and eggs and spending way too much time looking at a field guide to bird’s eggs and evaluating their different patterns and how they are made.  So of course, I had to stop and make a screen of those as well. Fast-forward and here is the result.  

Nature Ephemera:  Flycatcher Fossil Fungus

http://www.cherylholz.com/art/detail.php?artid=124467

Well as it frequently happens, one piece leads to another.  Sometimes its preplanned and logical, but sometimes its merely not wanting to waste the rest of the palette you've mixed or that screen that's loaded with ink and will just go to waste, so why not put it on…. (she thinks as she looks at all the potentially eligible projects/problems/prospects on the wall…)  that one.   I found two potential recipients.  And so that's how these two what I like to call “peripheral pieces” were started….

And there they stayed for weeks, with countless options being considered for the center/focal point.  An actual nest and egg were an obvious choice-sure! That would be fun, and although I have a good collection of both- none of them were a perfect fit. So- they hung there bugging me.

   

   Then I did an acetone transfer onto an old page for another piece, and perhaps it was the palette of the old page that seemed to lend itself to the colors of my unfinished panels…or? But anyway it hit me that this could be the solution.  . …and as soon as I tried a very old birding illustration on that page- that was it. 

"Ovenbird"

"Tree Swallows on a Wire"

So not only did they provide the focal points for these two, it spurred me on to other pieces.  I greedily went thru pages of this old book, selecting birds not only for their beauty- but getting sucked into reading about their habitats and behaviors… not really what I should be doing with a big deadline looming on the horizon! But those passions fueled these small ATCs (Artist Trading Cards) and were the perfect solution for me to use more of that bird imagery- and my feather collection- on a small scale….

 

I totally enjoy playing around with pure abstraction of color and pattern- but it is just not enough for me.  I am compelled time and again to incorporate examples from nature that relate…. and if it leads to hours perusing birding guides, then so be it.    I guess I am really am a wannabe naturalist with an artistic bent.  I plan on continuing this birding series further…Stay tuned...

Probably not what my mom had in mind...

...when she taught me to sew!  I can't really pinpoint what motivated me to do this-maybe all those lovely papers I've been collecting and altering?  All I know is that I kept waking up in the morning with the urge to sew these papers together, so....I lugged the sewing machine to the studio, wrestled with the tension knob, and started sewing!  I love the pattern stitching makes- even without thread, but then there are of course a whole palette of colors of thread, and the lovely little threads that are like fringe along the edge.  And bonus- I can immerse them in wax as well so they can play with my encaustic works! 

Here’s an example of how one came about...

arranging and selecting the papers/shapes/textures...
(an old intaglio print that I painted on,
(see this post http://holzstudiosampling.blogspot.com/2015/10/altered-papers.html),
banana bark paper, a page from an old encyclopedia of Britannica about louis XVI...)

stitching some of the layers together...

considering the background...

keeping the threads out of the way from the blowtorch and wax...

auditioning it on its panel...

adding some more layers of texture and staining- and i think she's done.... 

Fall Art Practices- Leaf Impressions.....

This week I’m still making seasonal art since I need to do this type of work while there are still leaves alive on the trees!  Unlike last week’s post where I was trying to make them very flat and take all the moisture out of them, for the cavo-rilievo technique (Italian for hollow relief), you need pliable sturdy leaves.  If they are too dry and brittle, it just won’t work.  


I love this process I've discovered for encaustic!  Although it took a bit of experimenting to find out exactly what temperature the wax needed to be, once I had that down it was so very fun to capture all the different types and shapes of leaves- and each and every vein!  

In very simple terms, you press a leaf- vein side down- into warm wax and burnish it in. You can paint around the edges of the leaf lightly with encaustic pain and fuse every lightly if you want a contrasting color in the background.  Carefully peel it up, and you've got an exact impression.  

For me, the fun comes in then rubbing oil paint into all the crevices to see the veins become more visible.  For this one, I used a turquoise blue which changed everything...I love that you can see some of the brushstrokes of the paint coming over, and a little bit of the background layers of color show up.     

  

Here's the whole batch of them and some detail shots....

Just after taking the impression ...

  

...and after the staining...

 

 

Happy Fall!