MIXED MEDIA: pushing the envelope(s)

At the left is a collage of actual pay envelopes from two jobs made for some art class I took somewhere. I can't even remember where or when, though it might have been the Design with Collage class I took at GLSP program at Weseleyan in the late 80s. I have had a lot of trouble deciding which way is up in this piece.

At the right is a digitized rendition of it which I think works better. I like the differing near and far feel of dark and light areas. This work is  not about pay, or mail or society. It's just about shapes in repetition and the way the eye moves through them.

MIXED MEDIA: the Conductress

This is one of my favorite works. It's fairly recent, from the last two years. I collaged shopping bags from Music Plus, (a local sheet music store in Danbury) and some discarded photocopied music  to a stretched canvas with acrylic medium. The figure I drew on heavy paper with a pencil and I cut it out with sissors as a hollow silloette. Then it was painted red and glued on top of the collage. I changed my mind just recently and painted the figure black and added the baton, which I had actually intended to add when I originally drew the figure. I toyed with the idea of a piano keyboard instead because I couldn't decide what angle the baton should take. The little areas of pastel color are highlighter. pencil, crayon. I like the sense of movement which is created by the angles of the staff lines, the edges of the pages, and where the photocopy machine made a dark area on the page. One little thing I did on purpose - inside the figure there are some blank staves. We are not finished works, new parts can be added, even if the previous melodys are never quite erased.