I worked at a restaurant named Eulipia in San Jose, California from 1981-1994 while I was going to graduate school and starting out as a college art instructor. I finally left when I moved to Tulsa to start a new career in Interactive Design.
This collage was a result of a photo shoot with three of my co-workers from the restaurant. We did the shoot in one of their backyards while they were sunbathing on a hot summer day. I had been creating a series of collages that used body part close ups combined with sky or other neutral colored backgrounds.
‘A Seldom Seen Stretch of the Eulipian River’
This collage resulted from having all the photos on my drawing board which was a large door actually attached to two drawing board bases. As I laid them out I started seeing a flow to the images. I originally had only one row, with the body below and the sky above. At that point it seemed like a landscape. But I had a lot of photos from the shoot and I laid out a second row to see if those photos might have a different rhythm and flow to them.
I got the idea to turn the top row over and the blue matched up and became a river in my mind. Then it was just a matter of finding the right place for each photo so the flow of the river was pleasing to my eye.
Another Color Composition in my week+ long series. This one was taken mostly because her blue strap was so beautiful running across her purple shirt. The black shirt with the orange stripes in the distance is the perfect counterpoint to balance it out. I tried a version with the orange stripes cropped out and it was not nearly as interesting.
Cherry Street Farmer’s Market, 6/14/08, Tulsa, Oklahoma
This is day two of the week long series from my ‘Sketchbook with Voices’ a sketchbook given to me back in the 80s that had an assignment, idea, or statement about art at the top of each page.
The assignment was to make something with one hand so instead of using just one hand I decided I would only have one hand in the collage. I loved the idea of a hard to recognize hand coming out of a figure with no hands. I was turning the two body parts into a new, unknown body part.
My daughters’ threw a party at our house back in 2002 on the last day of school. One of their friends had her whole arm tattooed. I saw her sitting in this chair and next to her I could see the same colors from her tattoo reflected subtlely in the wall beside her.
