January 2016


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collage art diet 2016 – week 4

This is the last week of my daily #collagediet for the month of January. I started this whole collage art diet shenanigan with an intense cleanse in December by being on a three collages/day regiment. I have been sticking to it on a daily basis in January so that I won’t suffer too much from withdrawal. I am enjoying the dicipline a lot but I am also aching to go back to paint and big canvases. Speaking of that, I am quite nervous as I don’t know how to get back and where to start. I might have said that before and I might be repeating myself. This diet on paper and the simplified and minimalistic approach that I have adopted has affected me tremendously. It has been a really interesting process to focus on enhancing the qualities, textures and characteristics of one cut-out. I am not sure how this will translate onto canvas and how it would affect my style of painting. My work on canvas used to be very dynamic, energetic and at times a bit crazy. The collage work used to be intricate and dominant. That started changing in my latest paintings and became more controlled and calculated. I miss that impulsive, mischievous and  playful quality and the controlled chaos that I used to create. This, I guess is a more mature me! If you go to the filter page of the website by selecting different years you can see the transition and you can see what I am talking about.

I don’t know what will happen with paint but I know that at this very moment I am feeling extremely insecure about it. I also know what could help. A good old diving vacation and the underwater world could fix the problem. I wish I could pull that off in a travel grant application and say that to get my inspiration back I need to dive deep into the ocean. I wish there was an underwater artist residency somewhere out there. I am actually not kidding. I have been thinking about this idea for a long time.

I also need to get my act together and start showing my work again. I have not done any exhibitions in the past three years for some very obvious reasons that most of you know. It’s about time and I need to start working on that again.

I will update this page with the remaining pieces from my January daily challenge and in February I am moving to a diet of three collages on paper each week. I hope that’s ok with me!

I am feeling quite chatty today. It is the sunshine.

Thanks for listening.

oh! and these guys appear more regularly on instagram than my blog.

 

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collage art diet 2016 – week 3

I did a lot of pink pieces for this week’s collage art diet. It was a good escape for the grey winter days. My favorite one here is the cabbage leaves on top of the pair of pants. It was an odd combination but it somehow works for me. The Japanese kimono piece was so silky and delicate that I almost didn’t want to touch it. It sat really well on paper. All I did was to stitch in place.  Another week is left from my daily diet and then I am switching to weekly. Check out my instagram for your daily dose of collage-a-day for the month of January.

 

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collage art diet 2016 – week 1

I think I told you last week that once I finished my December collage art diet challenge I had a sense of separation anxiety and experienced some kind of a withdrawal effect. It was a very intimate and intense process so it makes sense why I felt the way I did. During the challenge the hardest part was the rigid daily blogging and social media posts. I enjoyed writing about the process but there were many days that I didn’t have anything to say. Now the one thing I miss the most beside making three pieces a day is the process blogging. It forced me to shape my thoughts better and dig deeper into what I was doing. So I have been looking forward to writing this post and showing you what I have been working on.

Below are the daily collages I have been doing since January 1st. I know my #collagediet pledge to myself for 2016 is three collages per week. So far I have been doing them daily and I am hoping to keep it like that for the month of January. I realize that not working in three-per-day format opens me up for more experimentation as I don’t get dragged into creating sets or a sense of continuity. I also want to push myself harder with experimentation, new compositions, shapes and lines and maybe start introducing paint into these works on paper at some point. Baby steps! You will also see a lot of repeating concepts, patterns and similar drawings. Almost everything that happened in December were new and fresh to me and I haven’t explored them further so I am going to keep working on them until I feel I have reached a saturation point. I know minor changes and subtle ideas emerge during the saturation phase.  Just as a reminder, these are collage works on watercolour paper –  6″ x 6″  and 8″ x 8″. The cut-outs come from Vogue magazine, my one and only muse for now. They are pieces of clothing, objects, body parts that I distort into an abstract form maintaining a kinetic, life-like energy without referencing the body itself. The drawings are my responses to the exciting textures and lines in the cut-outs or whatever inspires me to build on them.

I am posting these as they come by on instagram daily so follow them there if you want a daily dose of #artoftheday.  I will do a weekly recap here on my blog.

Thanks for reading and watching!

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Is it finished?

Here is another update on the status of  the “gentle” work-in-progress that I told you about last week. You see I managed to contain myself and stay soft.

Half an hour ago before I started writing this update, I thought  I had finished the work and I was going to apply the final coat. The thing with me is that I never know when I have finished a piece. I can go on forever being finicky but there is a moment that I  just know  I have to stop. One, for the sake of not messing up the entire work  (which I have done many times by the way) and second, because I don’t know what else to do. It  feels very good when you can step back and confidently say “Done!”. It is rarely like that though. However once I let go and let the piece be, it somehow puts itself together. I know it sounds a bit strange but it’s true. I am facing this dilemma again and I feel that I need to go back into this work. I might. But for now I will keep staring at it on the white wall to see if it asks me anything more. Feel free to let me know what you think.

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warming up for 2.5 meter marathon

I  am a procrastinator. I have finally accepted that.  There is this  massive 2.5- meter-long piece that I started in late October 2013 and stopped half way in between. Now the momentum is gone and I have to find my way back into it somehow. However, just like the way I used to procrastinate for exams/deadlines and  would take care of all the possible unfinished tasks I could think of, I have done quite a few smaller pieces in between. I need to get going on this massive neon madness! so I have cut over 100 pieces of patterns and shapes  for it. And  I am doing some warm-up works towards it.Here is the image of the neon -giant in progress.

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