Abstracting the Landscape

a friend in the Yukon sent me a photo this week taken on Montana Mountain

the Yukon is chock-a-block full of deserted mines and many are found high in the mountains... this photo is of one of them

there are interesting elements in this image so I thought I'd play around with it a bit

(my friend has granted me blanket permission to do what I will with her photos which I will forever be grateful for)

 as part of Karen Ruane's online course "Alchemy" I want to work with the Yukon as my subject but I still haven't quite settled on exactly what and how... a lot of ideas are floating around but nothing is really grabbing me, and so I shall play with a few ideas to sink into the subject, try some different processes and see where they take me

I began by toning down the colours - the Yukon sky is a bright blue almost all of the time but I wanted more of a winter tone, a slightly faded, greyer version

I think it lets the whites be brighter and the textures of the landscape come forward

I gathered a few fabrics for the mountains and then a collection of fabric and papers I had painted or  printed

the first one you see here is the first one I did

it's so obviously laboured over - the next three went quicker, the last especially so

but this one... too busy, too many pieces

when all was said and done I went back and did a few edits on this and one other one - they're all pinned now and ready to be basted

this one was the third and it also looks different now, a couple of minor changes but surprising how much they have changed things

and this is the last one - it was also the quickest, perhaps because it's also the smallest, but I also think this kind of work gets easier the more you do it

I am not trying to replicate the photo, not wanting to duplicate the scene, just taking elements I see in it and incorporating them in these small collages

nothing needs to be in the right place, nor at the correct scale

so now to baste them and then see what comes next

no idea what that might be but I'm sure looking forward to figuring it out