Limited materials, limited palette

 

Songs of the Soldiers
Jo Reimer
Collage on Paper
7.5" x 7.5"

 On a recent week at the coast I determined to limit my art supplies and took only a small box of compost with an assortment of black and white and a limited palette of colored papers and supports. It was a good decision that forced me to seek variety within limits. I learned that it's possible to do satisfactory work with limited means and is an appealing challenge.

The name of the above small collage came from a piece of sheet music with my uncle's signature, dated 1918-19. Keith lost one arm as a teenager and couldn't serve in WWI but he loved to sing and I can imagine him thinking about those at war as he sang the songs that were currently popular... "Over Here" and "Over There" among them. The picture of the baseball player also was from that era.

Red Maple - Late Fall
Jo Reimer
Collage on Paper
12" x 12"

Red Maple - Late Fall is the main work I intended to do that week, an abstraction of the colors I saw from my front door, taken from this photograph:

Then I got out some paint (still the same color palette) and did a quick painting, remembering some recent weather:

Unsettled
Jo Reimer
Acrylic on Paper
9" x 12"

Then back to the collage box for the next piece:

Under the Clouds
Jo Reimer
Collage on Paper
9" x 12"

All these papers were ones I previously painted or dyed except for the brown, upper right corner.

And this is the final one in the series:

Teatro
Jo Reimer
Collage on paper
9" x 12"