August was a busy month, with both creating new work, and entering some upcoming exhibitions. Fingers crossed that I get into at least some of them. In the meantime, I've been making more collages, collage magnets, and Christmas ornaments.
I was accepted into the Artists Boutique Fine Art and Fine Craft Show that will take place the first weekend in November in Kirkwood, MO. I did this show last year and it was a great experience.
There were a couple of show's that I entered that I didn't get accepted into, but I'm still waiting to hear on others.
Recently I was contacted by a former teaching colleague who now works at a senior living center here in St. Louis. She wanted to know if I might be interested in teaching art classes at the center and, long story short, I taught my first class a few weeks ago and will do another in November. It was a lot of fun! I do enjoy teaching.
Shown above are my most recently created collage pieces. The piece on the left, Follow the Sun, was a bit of a challenge. I knew I wanted to create an abstract landscape and I had laid out some papers to begin a composition, but wasn't feeling any inspiration. I walked away from the piece for a day or two and when I returned I started looking through my paper stash again. It was then that I found the large red circle that's at the top right of the piece. Once I had that piece in place, the rest of the composition fell into place. I'm really pleased with the final result, and the piece has already sold!
The middle piece is, Falling Into Place. It's a smaller piece, 11" x 14", and was created using some of the collage squares that I created from Cat Rains', Collage Kickstart class that I mentioned in my last post. Most of the papers that I used in this piece were hand painted.
The final piece, In the Rainy Season, was just completed today. It will be one of my entries in the upcoming National Collage Society Annual Juried Exhibit. This piece measures 16" x 16", which is larger than I usually work. The size proved challenging and the composition went through several transitions along the way. The piece is centered around several National Geographic magazine pages that were treated with Citra-solv. This solvent dissolves the ink on the pages and produces a variety of interesting effects.