Wednesday 2 November 2011

Photography gone wild with paint and collage


Last weekend, I participated in a Maureen Brouillette workshop. The moment I saw Maureen’s work it was love at first sight!  I saw her techniques as a perfect combination of photographs, collage and paint in a single art piece. That’s why when she announced a workshop I was the first in line to get there.  Whenever painting is involved, I find myself outside my comfort zone so I started this workshop with a degree of trepidation. However, this workshop was a pleasant exception.
We had such pleasant time learning creative details that I never would have envisioned.  Also, seeing such a master at work was worth a thousand “art how-to books.”

The original photo taken in Astoria, OR

The finished piece from the workshop, combining fragments of graffiti from PortlandOR, collage elements and the above image
Close up of a collage part



8 comments:

  1. Looks great, Elena! You should be so proud. --Carol Leigh

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  2. Hi Elena, very interesting piece that leaves me with questions. Is the finished piece actually collaged onto paper - photo elements printed or found, then torn or cut and collaged along with actual paint added? (An 'Old School' approach) - Or is this actually all achieved in a Photoshop type program with a paint program added and then printed from a kind of 'collaged layered image' onto a sheet of paper?

    I'm seeing a lot of this kind of work in Blog Land and I have been wondering. They seem to have a 'collage' type format, but they don't have that certain feeling that the word 'collage' always brings to my mind. Like there's something more pristine going on here. Like there's no 'hands on' involvement. They look like an 'old school' collage would look if it was photographed and then printed in a glossy magazine. I am wondering because I'm seeing a lot of these - only on-line - and I usually never see any description i.e. 'photo image' or 'mixed media on...' with an actual size spec.

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  3. Thank you Sharon,
    I agree, I should've explained better. This is a mixed media collage on paper (9x12 in). I used black and white toner copies of my own photographs. All elements are cut or torn (whatever you prefer) and glued to paper. The negative space is painted. And more collage elements may be added later. Here I used a lot of paint on my photo, but this is not necessary, you may tint only some elements of the photo.

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  4. Delightful piece, and the closeup is a resolved work in its own right.

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  5. Elena, thank you for your follow-up explanation. WOW! I can imagine now how amazing this piece must be. I was thrilled to hear your answer. It is sometimes really hard to get the 'feeling' of a piece because every piece must be photo'd to show on-line. Knowing how you worked on this piece, I can now get a much better sense of its surface. Beautiful work.

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  6. I gotta say your piece has been on my mind ever since I saw it... It's exciting, isn't it? All the various elements that can be used to create a physical piece (emphasizing "physical" because I do so much photo-combining in the computer). Like you, I find the painting part kind of scary, but I can see how this would be a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing it, and thanks again for the further explanation you gave in response to Sharon's post. --Carol Leigh

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