Stencil Collage

Sara's lovely daughter

This was really fun to do. The collages are so vastly different than the oils to work on. There's almost no connection at all, beyond the initial stencil rendering. I love working on this tiny scale (this one is 5 x 7), where slivers of paper transform the entire image and where painting the stencil on is a little magical, because the image seems to float up out of the background papers with each brush stroke. It always reminds me of The Agony and the Ecstasy's imagined description of Michaelangelo explaining the way he works with marble - he has Michaelangelo say that he can see the figured embedded in the stone, and it's just a matter of chipping away the pieces that aren't part of the figure. I'm not even remotely comparing myself to Michaelangelo here, but that image of a statue emerging from a rock slab feels very similar to the stencil portrait emerging from the collage.