Recycled plastic landscape collage

I haven't been sending out much mail art lately.  I need to get some work together for a little upcoming show and what's intersting me are the little things I make (thinking I'll send them out).  

This morning I decided to do a colour study using a bit of leftover plastic as a starting point. I inteded to whip these off and send them out.  I decided I would choose three colours in the plastic and mix them to make different values and hues and then sew the plastic to the surface. The background painting began as a middle value from mixing two of the dominant colours in the plastic. As I continued to paint, they seem to have been inspired by Diebenkorn and my fused plastic quilts. 

The bad news is that I have been forbidden from sending these out as well. 

‘There is no whiteness so white as the memory of white.’

The title of this post is something Giorgio Morandi said, according to Barbara Haskell in her book on Milton Avery.  I have been reading.  Haskell also refers to Okeefe who said , ‘nothing is less real than realism.’ I have been dreaming about those words and working.  I think some of the struggle has been about ensuring, to myself, that I have some skill and that is easy to translate into drawing correctly and perhaps drawing realistically.  Diebekorn reminds not to believe in the first thing.  I don't BELIEVE in today's beginning oil sketch, but I do know that I need to trust my memory and my sense of colour and not worry about creating 'feminine' art. 

VISPO Collaborative book

Keep the cacophony

of

anit-figurative

noise 

at bay

Express emotional 

tonbality

in colour

Play with 

space

The VISPO (Visual Poetry) collaborative book project has helped me to reconnect with Richard Diebenkorn's work and I've learned much that I've filtered and tried to respond to in my pages.  

For Christmas I received Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series. 

For those of you who don't know, Diebenkorn lived in California.  He spent time at Stanford University, where I studied painting and drawing.  His contemporaries were some of my professors.  They were from the 'California School': Frank Lobdell, Keith Boyle and Nathan Olivera.  Olivera and Lobdell taught me to use monotype.  They also made monotypes with Diebenkorn. As I read the essays in the Ocean Park book I began to see my Stanford experience from a new angle.  familiar things I'd heard from Lobdell, Olivera and Boyle came back and fell into a new context. At Stanford there was a strong tradition of life drawing, a place that Diebenkorn came from.  Interestingly, Diebenkorn stopped working figuratively once he embarked on the Ocean Park series.  I am at a crossroads as have just moved into a big, beautiful studio with much light.  It was a similar impetus that triggered Diebenkorn's shift. I am curious to see the impact of a place on work, imagery and meaning. The back page (shown here) is an inkjet transfer of the view from my studio drawing table after I had completed the monotype for the front One of the interesting things I learned about Diebenkorn was that he was one of the first artists to see the world by air.  A govt scheme took him up in a plane to see the California landscape from a plane. those layers of experience do leave their mark... Not surprisingly,Diebenkorn's work was called 'visual poetry' by one critic.  One of the essays in the book is by Peter Levitt, poet etc... 'Richard Diebenkorn and the poetics of place'.  Wow what a piece of writing!  

So much fun to be involved in a collaborative project. So wonderful to have so much to learn and so much to explore ahead!