Lisa Hochstein

Lisa Hochstein is currently living and showing in Santa Cruz, California. I'd seen many of her collages circulating on Pinterest of late, but had not seen her fiber art until I visited her website, here. Her paper collages in the past couple of years have been done with torn vintage sheet music covers, or other salvaged paper. The collages are fairly small, whereas the collaged and stitched fabric works are larger, and also done on salvaged fabric, and sugar and salt sacks. 

Loving Cardboard - Ryan Sarah Murphy

Here is another installment to my homage to re-use, and especially cardboard. This is the work of Ryan Sarah Murphy, website here. I like the layering and the unusual use of color. I'd better get back to some cardboard collages.

Cecil Touchon

Just enjoy these beautiful collages by Cecil Touchon, and go here if you want more.

Lately

Here is what I have going in the studio lately. I've never been into blue, but it's cropping up. I think it's all the Swedish movies I've been watching! I've been playing around with painted cardboard collages. I really like the color play, and to re-use all those cardboard boxes that things have been arriving in through the mail feels virtuous.

Flickr Find

All of these photos are from a Flickr friend At-Swim-Two-Birds. I love the way this artist sees her world. She is endlessly creative, and uses everything around her to make art. Take a look at her sets. Her blog, which you can find here, is also fun.

Today

I ate summer vegetables with melted cheese, cut flowers from the garden, and started this linen collage on a panel. I want to put much more drawing into it tomorrow and see where it goes. That's about it. Summer simplicity.

Process

Here is the latest in the Boro-inspired drawings I've been working on. I decided to make this one a bit more organic and so I referred to a sketchbook for ideas, and decided to add these caterpillar shapes. 

Sometimes I wonder how all the work I've done in sketchbooks serves my more resolved work, so this is encouraging to me!

Ephemeral Collage

To avoid working on a project I need to be working on today (does everybody do this?) I started playing around in my collage boxes. I made these "ephemeral collages". It's fun to play with all these great snippets and shapes, especially when I know they are just doodles. I'm going to keep making these until I get bored with it.

Collages of Tony Fitzpatrick

Tony Fitzpatrick's collages are so intricate and full of endless things to look at and imagine. They are like children's storybooks to me. I can go inside there and just wander around and make up my own stories about each image. I would like to be in Chicago, going to see his new work, which opened last night at Firecat Projects, which is his former studio in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago, and now a commercial gallery, kicking off with this show.  Read more about it  here. 

Artists to Know

These are artists I've become familiar with through Flickr. They are: Olivia Jeffries, here (top left), Paola Gaviria Silguero here  (top right and bottom left) and Akinao Saito here (bottom right). What I am attracted to in each one is the abandoned way they draw. It seems that they are only listening to something they hear, not a trend or a style that comes from without.

Deeper & Deeper

Yep. Deeper and deeper in love with drawing and collaging. I love this artist because she is so obviously in love with the process of making art. Line Juhl Hansen. I was pulling out materials to start a collage and I just thought "what will come of it all?" when I looked at this pile. That is what keeps me going...finding out. It's never what I think it will be. But I always handle whatever comes up somehow, and learn something. 

Busy Days

I'm getting ready to go to haystack for twelve days! I'm taking a hand building ceramics workshop. Something different and out of my comfort zone. I've done a little hand building and I love it, and working with clay seems like an extension of drawing to me. We've been gardening and cooking too. And exploring color and pattern and drawing are always a refreshment.