I'm feeling very honoured to have had comments on a few of my posts here from Ellen Golla herself after having found and joined her own blog site which she then followed the link back to my blog site. In honour of that I thought I'd include photo's of the paper mosaic collage I created inspired by her images.
I created this collage mosaic based on a sketch I did of the light patterns from a lamppost that had grown up into a tree. The image by Ellen Golla that fed into my version was "I'd Drown Looking for You" which I found on her website and did my own sketched version above. It was the flow of mosaic pieces that really caught my eye, along side the contrast of the vibrant and shinning colours in the centre surrounded by the darker shadowy areas. My own version tries to tie in these elements of flow and vibrant colour. The allusion to fire is something that I'm happy with because Ellen herself also uses a lot of fire images in her own work, which makes me wonder if it has symbolic meaning for her.
My comments in the previous post about her work mentioned how labour intensive I found doing this image. I took about four hours to do this small A3 size image, working for an hour each time for four different sessions, most of the time taken up with cutting the pieces. Towards the end of the piece, for the areas down the bottom, I tried to short cut the amount of time spent cutting by folding the paper a few times over and cutting through five or six layers at the same time. The saved on time but ended up with irregular shaped pieces and sometimes picked up on colours in the magazine scraps that weren't quite right. The pieces in the middle of the image were cut individually so it features little detailed pieces that I wanted to include such as the tiny little slice from a cello showing the f shaped sound hole. There's also sections in the darker areas with pieces from birds and animals, because the magazine that I used primarily was the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds magazine, but I quite like their inclusion, as it's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.
When I featured Ellen Golla's piece "Tea Time With Gordy" a few posts back she was kind enough to comment that she had taken a few months to finish the piece, working on the piece for a little while each day, which is quite amazing. It was also really nice to find out from her that the foreground images, such as the tea set and the swans were indeed taken from photo's she'd taken and placed on top of the mosaic pieces, which is what I'd thought from studying it. Having her feedback has been invaluable and I'm very grateful.
It's so interesting for me to see someone else's take on my work, I can't tell you. I definitely recognize the image on top! I've never seen a sketch of one of my pictures before. It definitely captures the rhythm and flow I was aiming for.
ReplyDeleteI very much like this piece you finished. I do like that light-filled (fiery?) image and what appear (at least to me) to be birds (or bird-like shapes?) moving out from it at the edges--nice energy to it. It's rather mysterious. Very interesting about your bird sources--some of my favorite bits of source texture over the years has come from bird feathers and pictures of birds...animal fur too. And, yes, fire. I just liked building up fire imagery, sometimes using bits from pictures of volcanos, fires, and bright sections from reproductions of paintings that could be made to look like bits of flame... For me, it hints at something vaguely ritualistic, dramatic, maybe dangerous. I also like the brightness and color, on a pure visual level.
I'm touched you've found inspiration from my work. I hope you do more with paper cutting and collage.