Tuesday 20 December 2016

Dreaming of moonflowers

I'm a hugely enthusiastic Pinterest user and spend time nearly every day pinning.

I think it's possible the concept may be based on the old fashioned hobby of scrapbook collecting. Decades before the digital era it was a popular pastime for people to collect pictures clipped from books, magazines, advertisements and cards and paste them collage style into a blank paged album. As a child in the 1960s I received blank scrapbook albums as presents at least twice.

Scrapbook collections took off in the late Victorian era as mass mechanical reproduction made books and magazines cheap and widely available. Its a quaint idea now, in this age when we're deluged with paper (a great deal of it so utterly disposable that much of it becomes landfill within a few days of being produced) but people once valued the printed paper products that came into their homes. Woman and children had recreational time together choosing and cutting out the pictures that appealed to them to glue into a scrapbook before the remainder of the paper got used for other purposes. Even in the 1980s I remember my grandmother hoarding brown paper shopping bags to reuse....

A few decades ago the term "scrapbooking" was hijacked by another bunch of paper loving crafters and turned into a business model whereby the practitioners created artistic theme albums. However, this new iteration of the scrapbook differed significantly from the older concept in that all the materials collated to paste onto the pages were newly manufactured items purposely produced to cater to the consumers of the newly imagined hobby format.

On Pinterest I have 102 boards mostly dedicated to art in some way or another. In the last 2 years the images I've collected are the most important artistic source I refer to when designing textiles, adornments, digital art and my mixed media art canvases. A lot of the pleasure of collecting images this way is being able to follow the link back to the source. In this way I've read many interesting blogs and joined a number.


A few days ago I came across the image shown below and tracked the source back to a young american artist that I'd been vaguely aware of; Jane DesRosiers - or she recently changed her name to Jane Spakowsky (got married probably?....aaiiieee! why do women still want to adopt their spouse name...???...surely a horrible patriarchal tradition best ditched with distaste) It's no wonder Janes art has great appeal to me...our preoccupations are the same (romantic images of women) executed with quite similiar aesthetic.




























                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Jane has 3 art classes she offers as tutorials for US$25 ea and I signed up for her class "Beyond Skin Deep"  (follow link to her Open Studio group if you want to check out her classes) 

The class includes 2 hours of edited video with commentary while she creates the beautiful artwork above, called "Dear Isis", starting from the blank sheet of paper. It's really well done and I enjoyed the class immensely. It achieved it's purpose and inspired me to want to spend a little time going back to making some fine art. Last night I created this digital image I'll use as the basis to make into a canvas utilising some of Janes techniques.

I call this picture "Dreams of moonflowers"

....however!!! I've made a resolution to finish and publish the 2 clothing designs I've been working on, before I'll reward myself with this little divergence.

Hope everybody is enjoying getting prepared for Christmas Day 


digital image for basis of future mixed media canvas Dreams of Moonflowers. Pearl Red Moon 2016

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If you are interested in buying an artwork or booking a commission, please email me at pearl@upstairs-art.com.au