Collages Jan 2022

Today was the end of a week making images at Mittagong (in lieu of Sturt Summer School which I now rarely attend). Nicola and I have been coming to Mittagong every year since 2004 for summer school, and sometimes for winter school in July as well.

This covid-19 year has been quieter, and we have had to resort to take away from different places every night (usually we eat from the same pub which has a broad menu, but they are closed). That has added a tiny bit of admin to our week, but first world problems which we are able to handle.

Having spent the week making copies of / being inspired by Klee, Matisse and Wood, today I took all of the offcuts and glued them to pages. This afternoon I had made a truckload of collages – 17 in fact. All on A4 copy paper. Here they are.

I worked without editing, for several hours I was on the phone to my sister, then I watched a history of Broadway on SBS and finally i listened to an improv podcast. When a piece seemed “cooked” I just stopped gluing things on to the page.

The fun part was having photographed them and edited the frames of them, I went back and gave the ones which needed a little more that little more that they needed. sometimes just 1 or 2 pieces of paper, sometimes just a change of orientation or a name which gave context (e.g. one of them looked a little like an elephant, so I gave it the name Elephant’s Meditation. that wasn’t the cleverest. I will get around to adding the names to these images at some point. Meanwhile anyone who gets the original will get the name too.