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. 

leftover plastic collages

A typical Friday night

In response to a very theoretical but also provocative symposium on Involuntary Drawing: Art and Automatism yesterday, I did a bit of tangerine scanning and let it take me somewhere culminating in a book.  The lecture featured the film of Matisse drawing. The characters hover around orange.  And  this morning as I was just finished attaching the velcro to the intentionless tangerine closure, Figgy called to tell me she had a pivotal poetry lecture and that it doesn't matter what the writer (artist) intends.  We all make our own meaning, so there.

Envelope

 'Intentionless Tangerine' cover

P2 &3

P 3 & 4

Back cover

Back envelope

What I'm reading

A poet-friend of mine sent me a collection by Anna Adams.  This poem seems so relevant to all we do in mail art/ visual poetry, trashpo, etc... I keep reading it and thought some of you might like it too:

BLURB

Think of caseworms in their streams
     gathering stray bric-a-brac –
     sandgrain, leafscrap, broken stick,
to disguise their tender forms:

Binding tesserae of trash
     close, to make a carapace –
     intricate mosaic face –
covering near-naked flesh.

Think of poets in the street
     finding unconsidered snatches –
     phrases overheard – for patches
to be stitched into a coat

That close-fits transparent thought.
     They obsessively construct
     intellectual artefacts,
Babel-towers to support

Flickerings of inner flame,
     shielding it from unkind winds,
     circumstances, obtuse minds,
housing fire in name on name –

Images purloined from Dream –
     using what they hear, touch, see,
     to embody mystery.
Poems swim upstream through Time,

Keeping in the present tense,
     hearing still the ever-young
     poets of archaic tongue
making one harmonious sense.

Permutations of the rhymes
     work like genes in DNA
     keeping poetry OK,
constantly renewing themes

in contemporary dress:
     Death and Love, and Love and Death,
     Poets’ truth, till our least breath,
sings our dole of consciousness.

Anna Adams: Green Resistance NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
(1996: Enitharmon)

More good mail

Cheryl Penn, a Vispo (Visual Poet), painter, mailartist was one of the organisers of the collaborative mailart book I made recently through IUOMA (International Union of Mailartists).  She sent me two pieces of vispo painted mailart today! I am trying to visualise her studio in South Africa...  It must be an exciting place! Two of the images are sewn pieces of the original canvas of the photograph sewn to the other side. Wow! Beautiful and original! But was my explantion clear?

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!