This collage combines two photos from a shoot I did with a fellow co-worker at the Restaurant where I worked. The color images in the background of the framed image are of the SF bay on one side and of the Nevada desert on the other.
‘A Woman Looking at Herself’, photo-collage
There had been a photo of a nude male on the wall in that location and I originally posed her to be looking at it. But it seemed tacky and I didn’t really like the photo of the guy so I decided to put an image of my own in its place.
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.
This is the third in my week long series showing selections from the ‘sketchbook with voices’.
The top two photos were of friends of mine from the restaurant where I worked back in the 80s and 90s. The bottom photo was a family friend from church. I know what you are thinking; you took photos of a church friend’s cleavage? What sort of church did you go to? The answers are yes, I did and it wasn’t the church that was odd, it was me.
As is often the case the photos had no idea they were destined for each other’s company. At the time I had a big work table and I would have hundreds of photos on it at a time, sort of like a person with a messy desk having piles of papers. In this case the two bigger photos, of the breasts facing up and the cleavage, just happen to land close to each other on the table at some point. I saw that maybe they would match up and started to see the heart shape. I found the ROMANCE page shortly thereafter and it all made sense.
The angel type image at the top just added the final element both compositionally and thematically to the idea.
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.
