“Shoes and Ships” started with a photograph taken on my cell phone of my grandson sound asleep under his favorite blanket. It stayed filed in “future projects”. That year I began my experiments with collage using digital layers of images, patterns, colors and filters.
The term “collage" comes from the French word meaning to glue. The art form has a long history. The first colleges were created in 200 BC just after the invention of paper. Eleven centuries later Japanese calligraphers used the technique. In the 20th century hobbyists and artists embraced the medium which still thrives today.
I have been drawn to photomontage since a college assignment (one of the four forms of collage) which uses photographic images as the main ingredient. The photomontage genre was first used by surrealist artists who arranged found images from printed material. (Imagine a female figure balancing precariously on the tip of a pyramid in Egypt in high heels with a martini in hand.) This genre of art tests the limits of a visual reality using an inverted sense of scale that creates its own bizarre storyline.
Sample Collage. 8 x 11
It was the surreal storyline I was missing in order to create a digital collage featuring the photo of my sleeping grandson. One day an idea came to me as I was putting away a stack of childrens books including an anthology of poems. I remembered a verse I memorized in school from “Alice and Wonderland” by Lewis Carrol.
In the nonsense poem a Walrus and a Carpenter are walking along a beach. It is a absurd scenario; surreal before the surrealists.
The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.
I remembered the verse almost as well as I remembered the illustrations done by Sir John Tenniel. The book illustrations are not the stuff of typical childrens illustration. They were sophisticated black an white wood engravings with the characters features exaggerated for comic affect. (Just look at the oversized Carpenters head and the Walrus’ Victorian mustache.) Something about them caught my attention as a child and still does now.
The famous illustrator Sir John Tenniel suffered an eye injury during a fencing accident in 1840 which would eventually result in a loss of sight in that eye. Surprisingly the eye ingury prompted him toward a career in art. He entered the Royal Academy of Art on probation in 1842. He never enjoyed the formal art training at the Academy. He preferred to spent his time teaching himself to draw through observational studies in public spaces including parks, galleries, and museums. Groups like the informal “Clipstone Street Life Academy” encouraged his passion for sketching. He devloped his signature style outside of formal training. It would become his life's work .
Sir John Tenniel (1820 - 1914)
Tennial was employed for 50 years by “Punch”, a satirical magazine first published in 1842. The magazine is named after the puppet Punch who regularly gets hit by his nemesis Judy. Punch is credited with the creation of the cartoon. The magazine was designed as a platform of political commentary in England. When Tennial was appointed chief cartoonist Punch in 1850, the magazine was selling 40,000 copies a week with his Political Cartoons being a main feature. He drew over 2300 cartoons for Punch. Later in his life he made a sizable living selling hand drawn cartoons. He was knighted in 1893.
Lewis Carrol wanted to illustrate Alice and Wonderland himself. His publisher convinced him to hire a professional. Tennial created 92 drawings for Carrol’s book and its sequel. The fee was paid by Carrol. The first book's illustrations cost 138 pounds which represented 25% of Carrols’ total income. He had some input into the creation of characters, particularly Alice. At the time Tennial created a similar character to Alice for Punch which may have drawn Carrol to employ him. It was a wise investment on the authors part. Since the publication in 1865, the book has sold 100 million copies.
My digital collage using ideas from Lewis Carrols nonscene verse, was a dreamscape. I imagined the little boy falling asleep mid way into the reading from Alice and Wonderland carrying in his subscious mind images which become tangled in a dream as he slept. - Ship. Shoes. Wings. Kings. Cabbages
The term “Dreamscape” was coined by Sylvia Plath in the first stanza of her poem; "The Ghost's Leave Taking."
Five o'clock in the morning, the no-color void
Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot
Of sulfurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
When I began my project, my initial concept was to place the sleeping boy at the bottom of the scene and have jumbled pictures floating above his head. During the design process, I gradually found that the figure floating peacefully on the sea of images worked better as a metaphor. A particular issue I struggled to resolce was incorporating a “pig with wings”. No matter how I tried to include the surreal pig, it drew attention away from the central figure unlike the common items; playing cards, shoes, or toy ship. Eventually I replaced the pigs wings with the flies wings over a cabbage solving the problem.
.
When creating a collage using digital layers I am working in a similar manner to arranging cut up pictures of magazines that I can place underneath one another or move to the top. I can cut away portions of any layer to fit into the picture plane. What a digital tool offers is the ability to adjust the order, color, transparency, or create mirror images. The options are well beyond working with a pile of magazine clippings. All of these layers can be shuffled around and saved as a potential final version. In the end I print the collage on linen cotton canvas.
When anything is printed onto fabric the color sinks into the porous surface. It is not like typical color on a canvas which lays ontop of the gesso. After working with printed images, I realized that this was a plus. I back off the saturation and even leave areas in grayscale, neutral or blank, like the sky or the figure; so that I can paint what can’t be printed to my liking.
I paint the entire surface. This allows me to create a color scheme that does not limit itself to the computers’ palette of color or the digitally printed color. Like most painters, I must experience the color in person. In this piece I stayed with a limited palette of blue, green, and yellow orange. I wanted the viewer to feel the atmoshere in the room with the moons’ gentle light peaking in the window.
I can’t count the number of times I have been asked how long did it take? In this case it took from the time I was in grade school until I finished sewing the edges in place in 2022.
Art is not about time. As the great Bob Dylan said “The purpose of art is to stop time.”
Until Next time……
Margaret
Always an enjoyable and informative read.