Collage and Pancakes

This tile was the one I made my last day at Arrowmont. It's fitting because that experience completely altered the way I look at my process and what I make. I took that new perspective to Saluda last weekend and was further rewarded with Katie Kendrick's wonderfully generous instruction.

In addition to intuitive painting and collage, Katie openly shared her techniques for achieving beautifully rich and textured backgrounds with us. It was so enjoyable to watch her and listen to her repeat her internal dialog aloud as she worked on a piece - almost as much fun as trying it myself.

Katie recommended that we work on up to three pieces at once (my kind of girl) so that as one is drying, you can move to another and work on it. At one point, I was pointing my heat gun at one piece and painting another with my free hand. Sometimes there's some nice cross-pollination that occurs naturally -- translation: if I didn't clean my brush or dipped it in a color I was using on another piece there would be a happy accident.

The wonderful texture of these backgrounds is lost a bit, but you get the idea. Painting the backgrounds was so much fun, I hated to move on. Michelle felt the same way.

Jane has this great stuff, it's design scrap from a sequin manufacturer. Basically it's the substrate that sequins are punched out of -- it's like holey paper on steroids. I used it to dig into the layers of the above background and paint through it like a stencil. You can really see the result in the lower left hand corner.

Katie is no purest. And I mean that in the best possible way. She gets her hands dirty, she absently wipes gesso onto her cheek, she mixes paint into her gel medium jar (I can hear some of you gasping at the mere idea - hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!) Her mantra: "That's ok." If the paper sticks to the paint, that's ok, if it rips some of the background off, that's ok. I love that about her. Everything is a playful experiment that starts with the question: What if? It's a great attitude for me to adopt. I tend to be too fussy and matchy-matchy, I try to control everything. So I went back to my table with the resolve to let go, dang it.

I collaged and painted and came up with an owl and a house that had elements I liked, but overall I was unhappy with it. I cut it apart and glued things down more haphazardly which improved it, but didn't fix it completely.

I loved the background -- I didn't have any problem just going with it when I was painting those, but my composition still felt too planned and contrived - very un-Katie. The owl-thingie was ok, I liked his funky little feet, but he didn't seem to go with the house. Or as Debbi would say: "....the house and owl haven't met yet....." I wanted to do things differently than I usually would and the best way for me to do that was to emulate Katie's free-flowing process.

When I came home, I tried my (left) hand at some more phonebook faces. This is a really important exercise for me. With each phone book page I painted, I was a little bit closer to cracking the safe. I pasted two of the better ones of my 30 or so tries together and got this:

I scanned it. Printed it out in a variety of sizes, painted one of them and went back to my original collage. This is when the house unexpectedly became a headdress. It's mounted on a 6 x 12 canvas.

Marny, one of my fellow classmates in the collage class, made a very astute observation: many of the faces Katie paints have these concentric circles around them, making them look kind of swaddled. Katie wraps her own head in her signature scarf, creating a very similar effect - a connection that Katie herself hadn't made. I love the idea that each of her intuitive paintings are like little un-self-concious, subconcious self-portraits.

The moral of the story: Sometimes collages are like pancakes, you might have to throw the first one out. And that's ok.