Artful Compost Revisited

Just Sayin'
Jo Reimer
7.5 x 7.5
mixed media collage with painted papers

I keep a small basket of 7.5" substrates, mostly 140# and 300# weight, to use for collage. A full sheet of watercolor paper tears down to this size with no waste. When I travel I can grab a few sheets and toss them into a box of "compost" along with scissors, a tearing ruler, and glue so I have something to play with when the mood strikes.

I've talked before about my compost and if you click the link above you'll see some pictures of some of my compost piles. My blog header is a photo of a pile of compost in my studio. I'm not talking about making rich dirt. My compost consists of paper, piles of paper which I've painted and dyed and printed in various ways. I call it compost because as I search my piles and boxes of paper it all becomes a jumble of color that often suggests new, rich uses.

I don't use much ephemera or other commercially printed paper in my collage practice, preferring to paint original papers so that the artwork I create is completely my own. The painted papers add a complexity that I can't get from commercially printed papers. Most images in my work are my own photos or drawings. I don't see anything wrong with appropriated images when they're transformed in some way by the artist using them; it's just not my way of working.

Have you started your own compost pile? It's satisfying... like Just Sayin'.



Magazine + acrylic medium + Nevr-Dull

by Jo Reimer

These are two facing pages from a magazine.
The one on the right is stamped with gel medium.
The one on the left has been rubbed with Nevr-Dull.

I often run out of steam in the evening yet I want to be productive rather than just sit in front of the TV with my mind out of gear. So a couple of nights ago I got out a stack of magazine pages, a can of Nevr-Dull Wadding Polish, some soft gel medium, and a collection of circular things I could use for stamps.  (This is not my invention but is something I saw online and don't remember where.)

I chose magazine pages with lots of visual texture and pattern and stamped overlapping circles using lids, etc. dipped into the gel medium.  After the medium dried I tore off a chunk of the wadding, rubbed the compound across the page, let it sit for a minute or two in order to soften and liquify the ink a bit, and then using quite a bit of elbow grease I smeared and removed the ink, leaving the circles which were protected by the medum.

detail of gel medium stamped onto the page before rubbing

Warning: Nevr-Dull is made of petroleum distilates so take precautions. I wear gloves and of course I don't feed it to small children. There's a definite odor about it.  The product is used for polishing metals including silverware and automotive trim. I bought it years ago in an auto parts store. I forget why!

These were two facing pages from magazine.
Left page is stamped; right page has been rubbed.

Two more pages ready to use in collage.

An Intro to Piecings... collage paintings

by Jo Reimer

Complements

I've been exploring another approach to collage, in a series I'm calling "Piecings". That's just what these collage paintings are... pieces of paper, most cut into geometric shapes and assembled, like when I made quilts from cut pieces of fabric. (This collage is 9 x 12".)

The focal strip was composed by creating a collage of long stripes which I then cut across the grain to create stripes of small rectangles.

Quilters often use a similar technique, especially within the Seminole Patchwork tradition where several stripes of colors are created and then cut apart and rearranged to create a pattern as shown here. The technique is thoroughly explained in The Complete Book of Seminole Patchwork, written by two friends of mine, Bev Rush and Lassie Wittman.

I seem most comfortable with pieces of color which I can move around to create a pleasing composition, rather than starting from scratch with a white substrate and an assortment of paints and brushes. Of course these papers started out white but first I had fun applying paint to paper, creating visual texture in a variety of ways. 

Another advantage of using some of the thinner papers I've prepared as well as washi, is that I can work with layering, like the blue area above which is a commercial thin "rice"paper layered over a paper which I painted with a grid, adding visual interest and complexity to a simple design.

9-11 World Trade Center Collages

9-11-2001
World Trade Center
8x10" collage

A week after 9-11-2002 I participated in a collage workshop at Sitka Center on the Oregon Coast. I was still reeling from the enormity of the terrorist attacks, from the images I had seen on my television; I think of nothing else, so three of the first pieces I made that week referenced the events.

I used one of my "writing that can't be read" sheets as the background, to represent the debris-filled skies. A striped paper referenced the walls of the World Trade Center, standing and falling. Bingo cards referred to the numbers of the floor and to elevators. And of course, there's the fire and the smoke, and the pain of loss.