Studio Notes: New collage collection
The circle of life
After a busy January I felt that I was creatively drained and didn’t have much energy for art making, even though February is kind of a freer month because of the semester break. I had a lot of plans and wanted to start a couple of courses, but I had to postpone all the plans, and focus on getting my energy back. This included sleeping more, eating better, increasing physical activity, and, well, letting go of expectations.
I am prone to creative blocks or just periods when I am not easily getting into the flow (whatever that is!), so I had to come up with ideas and strategies for those periods. One of them was a decision I made last summer - to make more space for personal projects instead of trying to create more content for the sake of content. So far it has been both a psychologically liberating decision and a real catalyst for my practice.
The other strategy is to lean into collage work. Collage is one of those essential practices I learn so much from and I grow a lot in skills thanks to it. My 100 Days project last year was mini collage landscapes, and it taught me a lot about value, composition and colour, and I truly enjoyed both the process and the result.
At the same time the limitations I created to make the project more doable led me to developing a habit of using geometrical shapes and creating horizontal compositions, which is not exactly what I am aiming for. I have been working on loosening up since last summer - through leaning into watercolour, contour drawings, learning expressive techniques, and experimenting with more organic shapes.
Recently, I noticed myself being drawn to rounded shapes, u-shaped compositions and circles. I believe that it has been influenced in part by my collection of portraits where the main focus is on halos, and in part because more rounded shapes are frequently used in our symbolic representation of natural phenomena, which I am interested to learn more about and explore deeper in my own work.
The Circle of Life
I combined these 9 pieces you can see on top of the article into a small collection that I called “The Circle of Life”. The name has been inspired by the shape of a circle as a symbol representing the connection between all living things and the natural cycle of existence - from birth to death, each cycle leading to renewal. I started creating these pieces intuitively, without the goal of representing the circle of life, it was the other way around - the experience of looking at the body of work led me to me the meaning behind it.
If you’ liked this post, you may find these pieces interesting too:
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I always love hearing from you in the comments - what is your way to get your creative energy back?
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Until next time!
Lisa
Your new collection is so amazing Lisa, you always do great art in collage!
C'est superbe Lisa !!