Prayer Art

Take a moment to look over here at Michael Mize's Nativity Scene.

It is also a prayer wall, a form of prayer itself, and a wonderful work of art made out of post it notes. The congregation wrote the names of people they wished to pray for and to have the church pray for on post-it notes. He then took them and made a mural. He tells the full story here and here in his blog.

And while you are at it, take a look at the rest of his gallery. I love the Communion Table Project, myself, especially Creation. Oh, and the Monoprints are great, too (and I like the story behind the Nonsequitur Landscape: Cold almost as much as I like the piece itself).

Collage Madness

I'm now taking the second semester of the book arts class I began in the summer.

It's driving me crazy!

It's a good kind of crazy, but it's crazy all the same.

I've always been interested in art, but in the past, my crazes have been smaller and more confined.

It's only been relatively recently that I discovered that there were things I wanted to say that I could not say with words. Photography became more and more important to me, more and more of a way of communicating with the world around me.

Then I took the book arts class and discovered that I wanted more.

First there was the sheer joy of making paste paper--something I hope to learn more about, since I've barely scratched the surface.

Then there was collage.

I did very little with it last semester; both of the books I made were photography books, and I am happy with them.

This semester, however, I find myself combining my interests, mixing words, photographs, and paper into a single unit. In other words, I've discovered collage, a form many of you are familiar with but which I had not worked in since, well, I can't remember when.

I've spread the floor over with paste paper, gotten gloriously gluey, grumbled as I overcut with the exacto knife (a new tool to me, by the way), and generally been busily, happily, confusedly, maddeningly occupied.

You can see from the included images--photos, by the way, since scanning would involve removing the originals from under their weighted barriers--where both interest and frustration lie.


Interest: It's fun. I can illustrate my words! I can combine mediums. I can do this.

Frustration: I still overcut. I didn't think to measure the pages next to each other when I made them, so I don't know how well the oceans are really going to match up in the end. Glue and I do not always get along (though I just opened a new jar today and it is working much better than the older jar was). The pages are stiff and unwieldy and so I'll have to scan and print them before I can bind them. This last is not, in and of itself, an insurmountable problem, but I have yet to figure out how to photo-adjust the images once they are scanned so that they look their best and still look like they belong to one another.

Overall, I am happy with the work, glad to have the rhyme not only written but illustrated, alive in a way I could not have seen it before. But, there is always the "but"!

Adventure. Madness.

Advice?

Photoshop

I have long standing love/hate relationship with Photoshop, one that has only deepened as I've taken the photography class this semester.

Consider the following pictures--or rather picture. The first has not been photoshopped at all--it's what came out of the camera. One is pretty much "normally" photoshopped, that is, the color and levels have been tweaked a bit to bring out what is there, but nothing has really been altered--it looks like what I saw and fairly faithfully reproduces a pleasant evening in the park.

The second has been far more drastically altered. It's now a somewhat psychedelic sunset, no longer peaceful, and no longer much like the evening on which I took it. It's fun, but where does it fall on the scale of things? Does it even qualify as a photo any more or is it something else ("digital art," a term I'll figure out one of these days)? Or does that take more drastic changes still? Is it "Art" or just scribbling with crayons (metaphorically speaking)? I had fun making it, but it definitely no longer reflects "what was really there."

Added to that, of course, is the whole printer-computer relationship: When printed, none of these will look quite like what they do on screen, which means I'll probably have to tweak some more.