Autumn Leaves 2015

WHAT DO I REMEMBER from the piece? The bright red leaf shapes against the vivid blue sky. Red ruby jewels in brilliant blues. Spending my first colorful Autumn in South Korea; after years of wet, drab ones in the UK, I took advantage of the crisp Season and went on frequent hikes, camera in hand. With memory cards full of leaves and trees of oranges, reds, yellows against blue skies, I created the montage piece Autumn Leaves 2010.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK was lots of small leaves, indistinct; just a mass of reds and oranges. It doesn’t work in the same compelling way that layering large leaf shapes over each does.

HOW IMPORTANT IT IS to consider the size and shape of the piece before the collaging commences! Too tall and narrow, long and short, square: very important and dependent on subject matter.

THE PROCESS IS LIKE A PAINTING, a picture that is already there, in one form or another. There’s a ton of erasing, and moving, turning, adjusting, re-sizing, deleting, overlaying, and redo, Redo, REDO! It’s a puzzle which I have no picture box to reference. So much of my time is spent zooming in and out. Establishing which areas ‘work’ and which are still a little messy, or cluttered. There is so much cleaning up: tidying up edges, moving some parts underneath others; all the while keeping close my idea, and the sense I want to convey.

The horizon is always the same, but the path to get there always changes. Balancing distance and depth between the seemingly insignificant details, to the large, whole image. And I love moving between these distances, just like when painting: you work very close to the canvas, and you step back to view the painting as a whole.

At first glance, it may seem accidental, chaotic and unplanned; but there was complete orchestration to get to this point. Like vines and roots from many different trees and plants growing, entwining, wrapping, and looping. These images don’t just fall into place; they must be coaxed, guided, tweaked, stretched and sometimes scrapped all together. Often, I end up starting again, as the collage has gathered more holes in it than a moth eaten antique doily; too fragile to withstand being picked up. Those days are trying, my friend.

HOW LONG DOES THIS TAKE? It does depend on the number of images I’m playing with: between 15-40 individual photos. I like to work a little at a time, frequently, so I can keep looking back at the minuscule details I am altering. It normally results with me dreaming about erasing parts of an image, and painstakingly moving images fractions to the left or the right, my body slowly becoming more tense and tightly wound until I wake myself up.

SO HOW DO YOU KNOW when it ‘works’? When the Result and the Objective join hands and flow together in harmonious parallel. It’s the difference between raising a quizzical eyebrow, uncertain of what hangs before you; and exhaling a soft ‘Oh’ in delight, before rushing to pay me booku dollars to treasure such a sight. Ideally, ideally.

AND THE COMPLETED PIECE: a tree comprised of about 20 individual photographs of tree trunks, branches, red leaves, orange leaves, and blue and violet skies. From afar, the image looks like a tree, with an abundance of leaves; almost too many for one tree. So one comes in for a closer look; to discover intricate, delicate layering, of branches, of leaves. This is my desired conclusion: to draw you in for a closer look. It looks familiar, but something is a little different. So please enjoy Autumn Leaves 2015!

Thanks for stopping by

Evelyn

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