ANNE TYLER QUOTE COLLAGE 2

Daylight hours are so short right now! Only one more hour and it will be too dark to work. It is a saturday so after a lot of grocery shopping and buying children's winter coats I am going to quickly sit down and start painting the faces..

ANNE TYLER QUOTE COLLAGE

Anne Tyler is my # 1 favourite writer. Her books about normal people with odd lives (or sometimes odd people with normal lives) are interesting at many levels. Technically, as a writer, she builds unusual characters in a seemingly laconic way. As for emotional content: these unusual characters often think amazing things about life and relationships. And those amazing things can feel strangely familiar. Many of her lines have stuck in my mind and live there. Every now and then I really want to use one. Today I started a collage around a quote from her book Digging to America (which deals with adoption): 'Bitsy felt sorry for those poor women who had merely delivered.'

FAMILY ART 2

Today was Affordable Art Fair day - I went to see my sister's latest paintings in Amsterdam. Yes, folks, this posting is full of blatant family favoritism - so skip it if you can't bear it! I love her work, our house is full of it. I just can't help it. Don't we all like to buy art from the people we love? Francis just returned from a trip to China and that shows in her most recent paintings. My absolute favourites were two of her smaller paintings. Francis always paints women and unlike us they don't seem to grow old.

Next my 12 year old surprised us with a neat little wood carving depicting his grandmother.. more or less.

Yes, she likes the colour purple and yes, her hair is grey. So it's pretty correct. I just love the tiny little feet.

THESE ARE NOT MY PEOPLE - PHOTO COLLAGE

This woman has been haunting me ever since I bought her picture, at a flee market in Belgium last summer. Tonight I found the right words for her. But how do I call this now? A digital collage?

CAT COLLAGE, C.C.S.CRONE SERIE 2

Although I always make a dummy I still messed up the lettering. Stamping is very precarious business! One false movement is fatal. The acrylic paint attaches to the ink instantly so corrections are impossible. I had to gesso over the background and start anew.

And then painted over the letters since I wanted a somewhat lighter colour. All done!

CAT COLLAGE - C.S.S. CRONE SERIES

On with my series of illustrations of that queer Utrecht writer C.C.S. Crone (for more information click here). One quote that I really wanted to do is 'Op het Predikherenkerkhof sat a cat with an orange hat on it's tail.' I took a photograph of a New York cat (who answers to the wonderful name of Beauregard Taplitzky) last year that I have been wanting to use ever since. So a cat-quote was very welcome. I also took pictures of the Predikherenkerkhof last winter.

The Predikherenkerkhof is a street within the former city walls of Utrecht. It is around the corner of the Breedstraat, which hosts the famous Utrecht cloth market every saturday of the year. Everyone who sews their own clothes goes there to buy their material - including me.

I did the background and the cat plus a collage of several houses around Predikherenkerkhof yesterday. Next I selected a piece of orange paper for the hat.

Of wihich I first made a copy on archival, acid free paper.

 And glued it on. Next I ruined everything by painting the cat way too dark.

And then I repaired it carafully again by superimposing a second Beauregard.

Phew! That just worked.
On to lettering next - always the trickiest part.

JULIE ARKELLS PAPIER-MACHE DOLLS

Last weekend I visited the Twisted Thread Knitting and Stitching Show in London. Among the many great things I found in Alexandra Palace - or Ally Pally as Londoners fondly call it - were a couple of Julie Arkells papier-maché dolls. I have loved her work ever since I read about it in Selvedge, that wonderful young British textile magazine.

The catalogue that went with a traveling exhibition of Arkell's work in 2004 (Julie Arkell Home) and that had sold out was also for sale at the fair. It does not have a lot of text but it does have great pictures. And with Arkells work it is more about the objects anyway. Anyone can tell that she is a collector of treasured things, that she has a very poetic style, that her papier-maché dolls and animals are solitary and often serious figures that are lost in our modern world. They beg of you to take them in for shelter!

London based Arkell studied fashion at St Martin's  School of Art in but worked with different media and even in the greeting card industry before she realised she wanted to work with papier-maché. According to the book she showed her first papier-maché objects at a Chelsea Crafts Fair in 1985. Over the last few years  she has become widely known and collected.

Although these pictures don't show it, she also works with abstracted text a lot, which I particularly like. Arkell has good literary taste. One flowery doll has the single word 'almost' embroidered on her apron. Another one reads 'slow'. It is probably only fitting that Julie Arkell does not have a luxurious website. You can find out more about her here and read an article in Selvedge by clicking on he link below.

Selvedge

Issue 22

Page 41