Scuffy the Tugboat final

Scuffy has been in progress for a while.
Here he is completed.

Screen

I have always wanted to own a stylish screen like the women dress behind in their dressing rooms in 60s movies.
This one was constructed from the cardboard box my ikea kallax shelf came in.
Covered in pages from le Petit Robert dictionary i bought in 1981 when i loved in France.
Also tiny typewriter keys stickers bought at dick blick's art supplies in Chicago in 2011.
Plus a border from a book of wrapping paper based on patchwork quilts.
And a little creative cutting.

Today I'm cutting it up to become part of a bookshelf in renovating. Mostly because it won't stand up very well and takes up floor space.  Although i do think it would also make a cool headboard.
Used a combo of pva and tapioca flour paste to stick on the pages and some seem more yellowed than others. Not sure if that's the age of the paper of the amount of clove oil i added to try and prevent insects from eating the glue.
Took me about 8 hours to Collage the whole thing. Talk about busy work!
Watched several movies on netflix whole doing it.

Souvenir of Singapore

Paper garnered last week in singapore.

Collage

Having watched elizabeth Gilbert talking about home on ted I've been collaging a little each night.
Here's some highlights from the as yet unfinished works.

Ferry Ropes

This piece was donated to Australia Street Infants School for an art auction in 2014.
I am unable to find a photograph of the work, but it has lived in my bedroom with me for several years, so I know it well.
Perhaps if you buy the piece you can send me a good photo of it!

The piece began, as many of my abstract pieces do, with a photograph. In this case a ferry and porthole on the Manly Ferry.
I then extended the colours and incorporated some serendipity from other works (this work was once a painting of a beach scene for my exhibition "Coastal".
My nana lives in North Curl Curl and when I first came to Sydney for University in the 1980s I would take the bus and then the ferry back to Manly (and then another bus) to get home. That lasted only a little while before it was just too much and I moved to Glebe, thus beginning my long residency in the Inner West of Sydney!
The ferry had magical connotations for me as a child, because of fondly remembered holidays where my family would come to Sydney and we'd stay with my Nana or my aunts. There was always a reason to go to the city via Ferry.
So this piece is nostalgic and calm. I love the pale greens and blues.

Beach Blanket Celebrity Squares: National Geographic Beach

This work was donated to the Australia Street Infants School for an art auction in 2014.

This collage is part of my Cabinet of Curiosities series from 2010 and 2011.
As I worked on pieces that put objects into boxes I got into boxes that were objects.
This set of boxes contain chunks of an aerial view of a beach somewhere in the US in the 1980s. It's a photograph from National Geographic.
In 2003, I did a collage series called Epistories. It used pictures of rocks from National Geographic. It was the first "magic formula" I found for making works that I loved. My first solo exhibition (Patchwork and Stories) in 2004 exhibited the Epistories.
Because of that exhibition, people gave me their old National Geographic magazine. I have boxes and boxes them.
So this beach piece uses some of those donated magazines.
I love this work because while I know that there are people on a beach the subtle browns and greens and white highlights form abstract shapes in my "cabinet" boxes.

Lots of concertinas

I have been carrying a number of old 2d works with me to the studio every Friday for a few weeks. Today I made them all into concertinas, with the intention of adding to them, making boxes or whatever over the next few visits to the studio. 

It's "school holidays" so no art for a few weeks. So I'm making notes here.

 I'm really impressed with this which is the "back" of the piece. It's just the normal spills and spots that happen on the back of any work on paper (well, any of mine!), but they look nicely abstract.

and above is the "front" of the piece. I'm thinking of some e.e.cummings for this (i'm quite taken with "I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance" right now).

This green piece above is again the "back", but it looks really good - it's layers of oil pastel and acrylic.

This is the front. it started out with collaged-in photos of some old Arnott's biscuits trucks.

The back of this one looks better than the front. I stitched them together because they are on quite thick paper and with the collaged elements as well they don't take well to glue.  My thought is to add more stitching, maybe even stitch on some text elements, or some paper on which to write some text. 

This is the "front' of the piece. it looks better in reality.

Not the same piece as above, but it was originaly made from the same 2d piece (and then cut down, re-treated and now made into a book!) It's a little dark in colour.

This green piece I always thought had potential that was never fulfilled as a 2d piece. I think it will come into its own as a book, although I'm not keen on the difference between the back (yellow) and the front (such a soft green with a map-like collage)

 

The front of this one (the green) was a portrait of Anne Maree. 

The front of this one was also a portrait of Anne Maree, with a collaged element (the purple bit). It adds a nice random element which wouldn't have made it into a book if i'd started with that.

Again not that happy with the differnence between back and front

This one is very brittle - it's rubbings from my favourite man hole cover at Frensham. They were put together to show a tree. Now they're just great as a book. But brittle, especially since the back is also covered with an Oscar Wilde play.

Trying not to make silk purses from sow's ears any more, so it may not make the cut next time I play with these.

So hard to get back and front to mix. The front is an old epistory. The back was washes i did today. Hopefully with another layer I can make the back be similar enough to pass.

And finally a snake book. made from a large piece of paper, with nothing on the back. I tried to draw some jewels. They look quite pretty. My vision for this one is some small black ink drawings or doodles on the back. Maybe some stitching or some tiny pockets.