a constructed landscape

my worktable has been strewn with papers for two weeks now... printed images that have been edited and cropped and cropped and edited and printed on a variety of papers of varying degrees of transparency

 i am not a proficient at editing but iphoto makes it fairly simple and when i get something i love I stop and hit "save"

(it's also how i know when a piece of work is finished - when i love it, it's done... rather simple really, at least for me)

last week was all about layering the printed images, trying various combinations in varying scales

a few were good but two stood out

the first is the simplest... the background piece was a cropped enlargement of an image of the side of the klondike sternwheeler taken on a rather brisk day this past march

(it's getting some restoration work done so i feel fortunate to got have several good photos of some the weathering along the sides)

the image placed on top of that is of trees at marsh lake taken last summer when i was there for a campout

again, heavily edited: cropped, reversed, and changed from colour to silver tone, then printed on some rather transparent tracing paper

(for reference, the original image is in the centre of the contact sheet ifurther down in this post)

the layered image makes the weathered boards of the ship look a bit like water

the trees, boards to build the ship

the trees, fuel to run the ship

the ship ran on the water 

the water weathered the ship

and decades on, there are paddlewheelers along the river rotting back to the earth, feeding the growth of new trees

this next one is comprised of three images: the top portion is a failed acetate print of the quonset hut layered over a cropped image of the clay banks that line the yukon river with a scrap of wave action at marsh lake the bottom... kind of a stylised shoreline view and that was when "a constructed landscape" popped into my mind

i like that - it's kind of a guiding light in a way... something to hold in my mind as i work

i turned it on it's side which abstracts it somewhat but prefer it the other way

the contact sheet i made from some of my favourite images... seems it's always sky, water and wood

after finishing those two collage pieces i realized i was getting way too attached to making good meaningful work and that, along with the whole of it just making me miss the north too much has led to the decision to put this work aside for now... it's summer and i want to do something lighthearted, to play and experiment and not get caught up in the outcome

the flowers are blooming and nature is calling so i'll take the techniques i'm keen to explore like mono and gelli-printing, photo litho, and embossing/intaglio with my wee printing press and try them out with all things floral

today i started warming up with a few sketches and tomorrow i'm making a plan... kind of an outline of what i want to do and the order i'd like to do it in

kind of like summer school...