We Are One
November 11, 2016 at 5:59 pm | Posted in Art Studio, Considering Ideas | Leave a commentTags: purple, symbolism
©2016, Joan Desmond, Unity.
I used the color purple symbolically here to represent unity, enlightenment, wisdom, and spirituality.
Borrowing and Burrowing
May 30, 2008 at 10:13 am | Posted in Art Studio, Considering Ideas, Mask Collage Series | Leave a commentTags: A Fine Masquerade, amethyst, collage, CREATIVITY, Imagination, MASK SERIES, pack rat, purple, The Borrowers
Amethyst Rat
Did you ever read the children’s story series about The Borrowers, the tiny people that lived under the floorboards and freely took what they could from “human beans”? In grade school I eagerly read Mary Norton’s fantastic tales.
We‘ve all had small household items mysteriously disappear. It’s a lovely imaginative plunge to consider a world of minuscule people carrying off safety pins, socks, buttons, and usefully recycling them on their scale, glove fingers into pantaloons for instance. Norton, a British author died last week and as far as I know, didn’t reveal her muse for “the borrowing” story.
I’m speculating that her inspiration could easily have been the antics of pack rats. One has been scurrying through the garage and pump-house this past year. Can’t leave anything out overnight. Every portable item is fair game. Nails, bolts, pencils, are carted off and later found piled up behind a toolbox, in a flowerpot, or buried in a nest. The foot ruler must have been a challenge as it only made it to the floor, but the bit of Velcro, store receipt, and plumber’s tape roll carried to the hoard just fine.
That’s how Amethyst Rat scampered into the mask story.
Following Where Water Flows
May 23, 2008 at 9:20 am | Posted in Art Studio, Mask Collage Series | Leave a commentTags: A Fine Masquerade, blue, collage, MASK SERIES, purple
Hydros Goat
Can weather be bi-polar? Today the thermometer has flipped over to 50 and it’s drizzling rain.
It’s a good time to introduce the goat mask image. Hydros is the Greek word for water. You may have noticed that many of the mask images have Greek names. The goat represents the aspects of water in the story: blue watered creeks winding through the woods, deep dark purple pools, and bubbling water running over rocks.
Approaching Collage
April 14, 2008 at 12:58 pm | Posted in Considering Ideas, Mask Collage Series | 1 CommentTags: A Fine Masquerade, blue, collage, CREATIVITY, lavender, MASK SERIES, purple
Shadow the Bulldog
The thirteen images that form the heart of the Stranger Than Fiction Mask Image Collage Series were created on watercolor paper using exotic papers, rice papers, and other handmade papers I’ve collected.
At first with The Lion collage, or My What Big Teeth You Have, I was working rather blindly, that is, arranging colors, textures, and shapes until a direction/idea began to form about what it was going to be. I use several different approaches when creating a work. With the initial collage it began purely as a design process. It could have remained at that stage, pure design, a composition of color and shapes that pleased me. However, a lion mask emerged, perhaps as I started that collage during August ’07…so I followed where it led me to the final content and the idea that the series would be about mask images.
Probably this explanation could make some people nervous, but what I’m really doing is trusting the process. The approach is essentially intuitive knowing there are ideas kept inside me, just waiting for their chance to come out and make themselves heard.
I continued the basic design approach with the next two collages and it wasn’t until I was working on this fourth collage, Shadow the Bulldog, that I was able to visualize the whole series. That it would be revolve around the natural world and animal masks.
The Lion didn’t make the final cut for the thirteen, I love the image but you’ll notice it sits on the paper different that the other two, and all the ones to follow. Oh, and this one’s a French Bulldog!
Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.-Henri Matisse
Purple Plant Masks do exist…
April 12, 2008 at 8:33 am | Posted in Art Studio, Mask Collage Series | 2 CommentsTags: A Fine Masquerade, collage, MASK SERIES, purple
Pythia Plant
Purple Plant masks do exist…as do Starry-eyed Harlequin masks, and so it is for all of the mask images in the Stranger Than Fiction mask Image Collage Series. For in the creative realm all things are likely. Masks fascinate me. Every culture has some form of them whether it is in all seriousness, masks connected to African rites of passage for instance; or the playfulness of donning Halloween or carnival masks. They are disguise but may represent archetypes and the varied dimensions of the human character. It is the associations that interest me, and the nature of something hidden, not necessarily the actual 3-dimensional rendering of a wearable mask. Therefore I create 2-dimensional mask designs. A Fine Masquerade.
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