Speak No Evil

I've been playing around with new ideas in my visual diary. While part of my just loves this work, part of me is not sure that I like it! I definately enjoyed the exploration. I wanted my finished work to be more like graffiti (short of actually being graffiti) and I wanted it to express something, inline with the true essence of graffiti.I met my objectives and I love the way the grey avacado dyed paper imitates a concrete surface. I like the incorporated bits of my 'heart nest' lino cut, street maps and random paper...I am just not bonding with the finished work. I'll keep working on the idea until it all falls into place for me.

Crazy Frog is finished!! I am so pleased that I actually finished this and I am really pleased with the end result. It's become a bit of a joke around here that when something happens that shouldn't we just blame the frog.... Mr Nobody will have to take ownership again as the frog is off to his own pond tonight.

I'm not a morning person...but I could be tempted to become one if the sunrise on the hill and moody sky looked like this every day!

Best wishes from me and the frog.

Virtual Tart Graffiti Exhibition

I’ve long been fascinated by Graffiti. For me, good (real) graffiti is equal parts art, soul and rebellion. It speaks to the viewer.Unlike art kept under covers and behind frames with signs that say ‘please don’t touch’ it has a life cycle. It interacts with both man and nature.

My original graffiti pages. These were cut up to become the graffiti boards being exhibited on the Virtual Tart website this month.

Sometimes it’s face is changed by social intervention and the process of life and death are quick. On others mother nature adds her touches, changes colours, washes pieces away, continuous evolution causing the piece to change in relationship to time and climate. Like all good stories there is a start and an end.

 I invite you to be part of that.

A collage of images from my exhibition. Visit the Virtual Tart site to see each image in closer detail. All works are for sale. Email me for more information. To view another series of collages completed by me click here!

Graffiti Exhibition.

Remember these book covers? I mentioned a while ago that I was going to use them as collage boards.

This book covers and I have been on quite a journey. Having a project has been so good for helping me to over come my depression. I missed the deadline for the international signature exchange due to it and the fact that I had made graffiti collage signatures that now had no purpose became depressing too!

But I got over it! One day I picked up a craft knife and cut those signatures to pieces. There was no turning back after that!  I cut out interesting pieces of the collages and re-assembled them into new collages. Instead of graffiti pages they became graffiti boards instead. I thought the boards would be my contribution to the 2012 International Collage Exchange....but guess what?

"D" was still my companion and I missed the deadline for that too! I made 6 boards in one almost manic session and couldn't bring myself to make the other 7 I needed in time. I hit the deadline with only 8 done. Depressing!

All was not lost. Just recently I had an unexpected opportunity to do my first ever solo exhibition at short notice. Lucky for me I knew just what to submit! My exhibition will be on the virtual tart website through out May. Please drop by and check it out! I am pretty excited about my accidental opportunity.

Is it just me or do these boards look wonderful just like this?

One of the original signatures, sorry for the shoddy photo. If I still had the collage I would re-photograph it but it was cut up with all the others. I really recommend cutting up homeless works, it's so much better than having them collect dust and reminding you that you failed to meet a deadline...it's a bit like having the last word, there's something satisfying about that!

Map pieces for me represent the community. Recycled papers, walnut dye, thread, indian ink...

Below: One of my collages for the exhibition. It has the remnants of multiple collages with some addition details. This is a particular favorite of mine because it has the look and feel of weather collage. The image is not really of anything but I really like it.

It's titled "Side Street." All of the collages are named after places you typically find graffiti. 

The text says:

I looked for signs and wonders

I have desired fame, riches

In strange webs of fortune caught

Thirsting to be more than mortal

I was even less than clay

If you have an interest in graffiti or guerrilla type art watch this space. A new collaborative project is in the pipelines. It's a little bit DisCo, a little bit Erosion Bundle Project and a little bit like graffiti...

Unify.We.Us.One

Remember the arthouse photo reponse project I signed up for a month ago?

The collage above it my reponse to the photo I selected. I'm loving this evolving graffiti style that's emerging in my work lately!

The decider for me (I was originally considering a photo of doors) was the ripple lines.

As you can see I played with the orignal image below.

From there my thinking progressed to the ripple effect, time and tides, movement, moon light, navigation, migration...and eventually I settled on unity.

The water connects the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Regardless of demographics water connects us all. Maybe this tide, that is now mine was once yours? Maybe it will carry a piece of me back to you? Will the waves that lap at my feet be the off spring of the waves that your sun sets apon?

We are warmed by the same sun, centered by the same source of gravitiy and our nights are lit by the same moon. Water is the only thing we can actually touch, it is mine, it is yours, it is ours.

Unify.We.Us.One

Graffiti pages...finally!

I am really pleased with the way this series turned out! It didn't quite go to plan, I missed a deadline for the first time ever and I only created 8 instead of the intended 11. Once the deadline had passed there didn't seem to be a lot of point in creating the projects required 11 but I really wanted to see the project through. I see this series as a bit of a turning point in my artistic journey and even though the series is complete the journey  isn't. It's exciting to have a new path to explore and I will be taking inspiration from these pages and the Rena disaster for my next ICE series.

There are a lot of photos to follow so I am going to do it in two parts.

Part 1

Page 1.

Personally, I'm not actually a huge fan of this page! It showed enough potential though for me to keep working on it and as you will see from the other photos posted they contain similar elements but the style is cleaner.

Page 2.

Jackpot!  Home-made walnut and eucyalyptus dyes, pencil, map pieces and stitching. I love the bigger blocks of paper and most of the pages that followed adopted that look.

Page 3

The first page with an anatomically incorrect heart-nest! (Linocut)

Page 4

Page 5

The stitched text piece is my favorite part on this page, along with the note paper my kids used and left laying about.

It took me so long to 'get around' to finishing the series. Emotionally and physically I was really zapped by the effect of my daughters surgery and my mojo left me. It wasn't really a time thing, I had plenty of time sitting around in the ward and it seems logical to take my supplies and to pass time that way. Unfortuantely my logic and my motivation wern't in tune with each other! When I decided to detox one of the first things I did was to sit down and stitch and it only took a short while to finish these.

School goes back tomorrow for us, I have 2 at home full time doing correspondence and I hope that this term I will do better at balancing school and art. I really struggle with it and even now as I type I am aware that I should be planning the first weeks work instead.

On that note...see you soon:)

Graffiti and Spring Flowers.

I'm posting these together because I took them within the same 15 minutes. Graffiti and Spring flowers sound like a good mix to me. I took them after going to see the Rena mess. It increased my time warp feeling but cleansed me at the same time. Life is strange sometimes, but it's still beautiful.

Slow and steady...

I am making slow but steady steps forward with my detox mission! My head really is cluttered at the moment but I feel good about the progress.

So far I've blown the dust off my visual diary and started scribbling down my ideas for next years ICE exchange. I'm playing around with the concept of life lines, originally the idea was laughter lines. I don't mean the wrinkly sort...my ideas are more focused on paths represented by

 lines _________dots.......dashes _ _ _ 

and the paths are the places I've been, seen and loved. I am not well travelled having never left the North Island of my own country but there are definately places that have helped shape me as a person and as an artists. I have an emotional attachement to them. Here's a link to a series of Mick Mathers that's appealed to me for some time now. Not the same thing but appealing to me for similar reasons as 'life lines' is. This post is also very inspiring, thanks Robyn for your perfect timing in sharing this! I like the idea of taking a meditation memory walk and revisiting some special places. I then wonder if I should be looking forward and not back? In my head I can see pieces of maps, sewing pattern paper and navigation symbols such as the Southern Cross and compass points but I'm not sure how it all goes together yet and I havn't  reached that 'ah huh! moment. As you can see I am still confused and my vision is a little cloudy. It will come to me in it's own time and until then I will patiently wait. I'm good with that.

The other thing I have done is finish my 9 Grafitti pages.  The weather isn't photo friendly at the moment so no photos yet. The collages had been in the 98% finished stage for months and all that was left was the stitching. I can't believe a project that took months to get to only took me an hour to finish! Really! It feels good to see them done and I think I will turn them all into a visual diary to use next year.

Photos soon I promise!

Thank you for your kind comments, I have intentions to visit everyone a few blogs at a time so see you soon if I havn't already! 

Anatomically Inspired Grafitti

I am so excited to be back in my art zone! I have been wanting to do another lino cut for a long time now but couldn't settle on an image to carve. I thought a lino cut could lend itself quite well to my graffiti pages for the International Signature Exchange and for want of a better search term I googled "lino cut grafitti' or something to that effect. Look what I found! The whole website is fantastically inspiring for a graffiti 'wannabe' such as myself! Full of inspiration I seized the moment and spent several hours drawing, carving, printing and collaging. In the end I only stopped because my shoulder blades were insisting! (Standing hunched over a bench isn't as easy as it used to be! lol)  Below is the result of my efforts...an anatomically incorrect inspired linocut heart-nest!

I realised after printing several of these that my heart is not anatomically correct. The valves are back to front! I was going to re cut it and but had a little laugh at myself when I realised that I was worrying about making a heart with a nest in the middle anatomically correct! The existence of the nest made it incorrect  and the rest I am putting down to artistic license:)

This is signature two for the swap. I am enjoying adding collage elements to my grafitti inspired papers. Below is the inside of page two, which will have a blank double-sided page in the middle making these pages 1,2,7 and 8.

Above, my sketches, not included in my signature!

Below, signature one for those who missed it.

Below, a segment of the inside of this spread and the back of the signature, heart-nest added!

Sneaky peaks of the signatures I've collaged but not yet stitched. Anatomically correct or not, I love this heart-nest! 

PSSST> Watch this space to see my contribution to Seth Apter's Style File, coming soon!

Rusted offerings

 Graffiti on it's sea weathered surface, my fave pic of the day!

The lines of the rusted railings and mesh fence lent themselves well to black and white photography. I especially like the sunlit strip down the middle intersected by the shaddows of the beams.