The Tower By The Sea

I made another collage of this old watchtower on the headland of the Punta de Ses Portes over the weekend. For this piece I used the painted papers from my growing stock of collage paper scraps, so none of the elements were painted specially; I’ve found that this method usually results in more interesting discoveries and the work has a bit more energy than when I try and create textures for specific elements of an image. There are very few individual elements collaged together here, i’m trying to let the textures breath and do the work. Having been working on collages for well over a year now, I’ve accumulated quite a lot of various oddments of papers I’ve made, in fact storage is become a bit of an issue and when i’m working on an image the floor can get knee deep in bits of paper as I rummage about trying to find the right piece.

An artist who uses collage a lot who I’ve admired enormously since i came across his work last year is Ed Kluz. You can see more of his wonderful work on his website here. There’s a lovely short film on the website  too where you can see Ed talking about his work and making a collage. What he says about using this technique sums up my enjoyment of it very well, and the shots of him delving into a box of papers, snipping with scissors and moving shapes around on the image is pretty much the way I work. Like Ed says in the film, I don’t think i’ll ever tire of it!

Moon over the Punta de Ses Portes

I’ve posted quite a bit before about the small headland on Ibiza called the Punta de Ses Portes and I return to it in my work periodically as it’s a landscape that I just never tire of.  I’m going back there later this year in October, until then I’ll just have to make do with pictures 🙂

The gallery space I’ve booked to show some work in February is very small, and you wouldn’t be able to stand far enough back from a big painting to take it in properly so I’m making work on a pretty small scale (actually as one wall of the room is mostly a big glass window onto the street you could make a big piece and stand outside to view it, but it might be raining so better not). This is a tiny painting, 17cms. X 12cms. including the frame, using collage again, of the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides.

Here it is again next to my pot of brushes so you can see the scale:

I’ve reworked a collage of Staffa I made over a year ago for the Alphabet Soup online exhibition over on Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ Artlog at the end of 2012 (you can see the first post showing the exhibition here, with the subsequent posts following that week). Alphabet Soup was expertly curated by Shellie Byatt (Shellie’s beautiful work can be seen on her website here) and Lucy Kempton (Lucy’s wonderful blog Box Elder here) and it was Lucy who first suggested Staffa as my letter ‘S’ for my alphabet based on the islands around Britain. when I saw the extraordinary basalt columns that gave the islands it’s character I was hooked and made a couple of small collages of the place.

The show I’ve got coming up in February is called ‘Watermark’ and is themed, very roughly, on water and the effects of water in our landscape, so it’s a good excuse to revisit this magical island, albeit on a small scale.