The Art Opening

This painting is made up from memories and from my imagination.
It's got an interesting rhythm that moves from black shape to black shape; not much rest here at this art opening. I had alot of fun using an analagous color scheme; putting limits on the colors allows for a more activity -packed scene. If I had, for instance, put in greens and purples and blues, the result would be psychedelic and over-stimulating.
The details become more prominent in the foreground, fading to shapes and more abstraction in the background.

Making a Collage about Teaching

Thoughts behind this Collage entitled: Disruption

Sometimes I'm in the mood to put together a piece of artwork, and rather than painting on canvas, I'll start working on a collage.

These always end up as more of a surprise than a painting does, as it's so easy to pick up pieces and move them around, or change a background. This particular piece started with the woman in the background. If you look closely you can see that her face combines animal parts with human , and the mouth and teeth are upside down as is one of the eyes.Clearly ( I hope) you can see how aggravated she is. She's a teacher, and her students are misbehaving in class; actually only one is, the other has the chalk in hand and is ready to go to the blackboard. She actually looks rather smug, because you'll notice that the teacher is pointing to the student who is caught in the act of staring at her fingernails.(though she really doesn't care, does she?) She is disrupting the teacher's thought-stream, which disrupts the thought stream of the students who are paying attention.

Creating a collage allows the artist alot of freedom to place things irregularly or skewed, and combine different media in the piece. Most of this collage was painted with watercolors on watercolor paper that was ripped or cut .