WILD CHERRIES: Mixed Media Artworks of a Bilingual Life

09/02/06 to 16/02/06

Immediately before producing the first in the series of tree collages, there is really no indication of what is about to happen and yet suddenly something does. It is tempting to think that the collage comes out of nowhere but instead it is the result of the mysterious creative magic that happens when I am able to get out of my own way:

I experiment with different ideas, I paint trees on plaster, I cut up printed photos into triptychs,

I got out all my tree prints and spread them out on the floor and had a good muse. then I trimmed the small ones and stuck them in my sketchbook and gave each one a name, some of them two. Then I tried a ‘‘ concept’ charcoal exploring my response to the trees and very quickly I began to feel that I didn’t want a plain white background so I looked in a magazine and found an off-white texture and stuck that in my sketchbook and inked some branches in over that…

and again,

I prepared one sheet in my sketchbook with plaster and three little wooden panels with a different texture on each one. I thought I would try some tree shapes over the textures… Read the rest of this entry »

I had been spending a lot of time doing abstract concept drawings and had begun to feel that although working that way allowed me to “express power, movement, light, perspective, texture…” it was too raw a way of working that revealed more of my inner emotions than I was comfortable with in terms of work I would show to other people. I decide to keep on working on them – as I was determined not to censor what evidently needed to come out – but to temper them with working on something quite different. Read the rest of this entry »