loops

Recently I stumbled upon the paper sculptures of artist Johanna Burke while browsing through the website designspongeonline.com and I was immediately inspired.

The image below is a beautiful golden jungle that Burke has created using cut paper.

I don't want to mimic what Burke has created. I want to explore the use of paper to create a relief sculpture.

I'm going to use magazine pages (reduce, reuse, recycle) torn into strips and then formed into loops. The loops will then be attached to a piece of matte board to resemble the image below. This is an image from a book titled One Million Things. The book is a visual encyclopedia of literally one million things. The image is made from data collected from two telescopes and shows infrared waves, light waves, and ultraviolet waves. I'm not interested in "waves" I just think the image is beautiful.

Since my media is magazine pages, I had to search though dozens of magazines and find my pallette. I separated my colors into warm, cool, black, white, browns, and multi.

This is a sneak peek of my sculpture. I don't have much completed yet, but I really like it so far and had to give you a taste. So please let me know what you think.

And just for fun, this is my cat Andy. I'm not sure if he thinks he's helping or if he's waiting for me to turn the other direction so he can chew on my paper. Either way, it's good to have some companying while I'm working.

I will keep you updated as I continue to work on this piece.

purpose

I've decided to keep a blog to document my artwork.  I'm currently working on my Master's degree and it's forcing me (in a super productive, stellar way) to create.  So I promise to continuously post my current, in-progress, unfinished, sometimes finished and always original artwork.  I just ask that you give me some feedback.  Tell me you love it, hate it,  or want to marry it, but if I'm in need of a new direction speak your mind.

I'm obsessed with peacocks.  They're turning up in everything I create.  I recently got a peacock feather tattoo on my back; it's beautiful.  This is a print from a single cut linoleum.  I'm really happy with the way it turned out.  It's bold and graphic and I love searching for the peacock's head amongst all the eyes on the feathers.

The next 7 photos are earrings I made to sell at an art teacher conference I'm attending in the Lake of the Ozarks this weekend.  There's a cool session called Bizarre Bazaar, where any of the art teachers can sell or trade artwork they have created.  Cross your fingers and hope that someone buys these.

I love recycling and I'm trying to use recycled goods in my artwork.  These are really simple, recycled coffee sleeves turned into notebooks.

So what do you think?