expanding

I've held a rather narrow view of the river in my work these past few years

 the current and pilings have been both the fascination and the focus and whilst I've loved every minute of it this week I took a side-step

the Klondike riverboat is an iconic fixture of the Whitehorse waterfront but my earliest memory of it is of the day they hooked it up to 4 Caterpillar tractors, spread 8 tonnes of "Palmolive Princess Snow Flake Soap"  on the street and proceeded to drag the boat through Whitehorse to a new location

half the town hoped it would rain and half the town hoped it wouldn't

(it didn't!)

this week I decided I needed to do something different

so to the Klondike I looked

a few quick drawings, just to find out what interested me

I find drawing the best way to figure that out, better than thinking or looking at photographs

I like drawing well enough but would not call myself an enthusiast so if I'm willing to draw something then there's a high degree of probability I'm interested in it

isolating the stacks, wires, cargo doors and chain-link style railings gave me a few ideas but for the "dipping my toe in" beginning, I chose to work with the stacks and wires in the making of two collages

in the one above I added a few shipboards

below is just the stacks and wires

the paper I used for the stacks is one I folded in a diamond grid after painting - the soft paper breaking along the creases, enhancing the look of them

a nod to the fence-rails encircling the upper decks

the ship boards were cut from a print of a photo I took of piece of linen I gathered and stitched shibori-style, painted with watercolour paint and let dry

i edited the photo massively, bleaching out a lot of the colour and then printed it on fine art paper to use in collage

actually, all of the papers I used were ones I painted or cut from printed photographs of papers or cloth I had painted

I like doing that, painting papers, photographing them, playing with the various editing functions on my laptop and then printing them to use as collage papers

doing that preserves the original painted paper and allows me to make multiple variations of it by varying the edits and then use them over and over again in my work

I suppose in a way these collages are as much a reference and exploration of those papers as they are the imagery of the boat itself

which is all very well and good except... now that I've started to really look at it... there's much to see

and more to inspire

barrels

stairs

frosted windows

wonderfully peeling paint

hmm...

two years ago I had a play with superimposing an image of the paddlewheel on a photo of the river on a foggy morning in August

kind of fitting to share this one again, since my own wheels are turning

take care,

Jillayne