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
2 comments:
I think this sort of thing gets faster in a session because it takes a while to sink yourself into it and stop overthinking. Once the whole thing is in head and fingers, it goes much more easily!
I missed this last week. It is good to see the process behind the current samples. This such a great project.
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