December 6, 2007

Stencil Collage

Stencil Portrait - Sara's daughter

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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really love this painting - the image, the background and the overall impression - it came out wonderfully! Love it!!!

mary jane said...

Absolutely beautiful! Really brilliant.

ANI said...

This is absolutely lovely!

Anonymous said...

I like your approach to collage...I was wondering how oil paints and papers work out together? I was always told to use water-based paints with paper collage, but I hate acrylics and adore oils...How do you make it work?