Mixed Media Collages

I am so in love with mixed media artwork lately! This piece below was inspired by my most recent jumping-up-and-down-in-love portrait fixation: family shadows! I did the shadows portraits for a couple of clients and then was THRILLED to be able to make one with my own family! There is something about the shadow silhouettes, the clean lines of the body language, that is very revealing but also mysterious. The other images in the collage are all from a wonderful day that we had together, including the wrought-iron heart doorknob from a church we passed, which was quite a fortuitous find! In then upper left is a dictionary definition of the word "illuminate".













This second piece was a fun experiment in using geometric forms and "compartments" in my artwork. I just love the compartments concept, I feel like it has so much potential to express so many things for me right now.

What We Choose

As a professional portrait photographer, my job is to connect with my subjects, to get a feel for who they really are and what they want to remember, and to create images that capture and project that feeling. I LOVE doing this - but one thing I don't get to do is to choose what I photograph. I wouldn't trade a single one of my clients for anything, but I have come to realize the importance of pointing my camera elsewhere as well, at what I choose, because what we choose to photograph is significant. I think it tells us a lot about ourselves, what we notice in the world, what we find beautiful, where we are at this point in our lives, and our own personal visual language. I have loved experimenting with paint and mixed media, but photography is my first true love and I realize I will always want it to be a large part of my artwork.

I've been making it a point to photograph something of note to me before or after each portrait session, as well as just in the course of my days. Here is what I found a few days ago in NYC after a Central Park session. I find I've been really drawn to light fixtures (lamps, chandeliers etc.) as well as windows. There are many ways to interpret this: enlightenment, truth, seeing, etc. Lots to think about!

Spring

I don't have much passion for "pretty pictures". For me to get excited to photograph something, or to make some art about something, I have to feel some sort of personal connection, some symbolism, something that "speaks". So, while I tend not to make the kinds of beautiful spring photographs that I enjoy looking at from others, I did notice a couple of things at the gardens after last weekend's portrait sessions that spoke to me.

The blossoms from this tree brought me back to spring where I grew up, in Kiev. To the touch, they felt like pussy-willow buds, but I think they were apple blossoms. I loved how they seemed to reach up and out. It's THIS part of spring that intrigues me the most - not the gorgeous flowers in full bloom, but the EXPECTATION. The promise. The mysteriously-appearing-out-of-nowhere dark, cold, dreary rainy (or snowy!) days in the midst of the thaw. And most symbolically of all - the unearthing. Rocks, dirt, plants, objects that have been frozen, buried, covered up under layers - becoming exposed again, washed clean by the rains, and possibly renewed.

Just Start

I have had a professional blog for years now, for my portrait photography business - and sure, I express a lot of "me" in there - but it's not truly ME. I've wanted a more personal, free-form outlet for a while now, but something kept holding me back. Privacy maybe? Or a fear that I won't have enough to say? Or that nobody will care to read it? I am, by nature, a private person - so being exposed on the web like this is WAY out of my comfort zone! But I have been trying to focus more on myself lately - on creating art for myself, for its own sake, for the sake of the process and of what it does for me - and now, I am going to participate in the Soul Restoration workshop - so it seems like a good time to leap out of my comfort zone and JUST START. I'm not sure yet where it's going to take me, but for now I'll JUST START and make the unknown part of the fun!

So, for the sake of starting somewhere, I'll put up a few recent pieces I've created. Until recently, I had thought of myself as exclusively a photographer. Sure, I did some painting in Corel Painter, but I mostly created paintings from portraits - again, a client-driven endeavor. Mixed-media artwork has opened a whole new world of personal expression for me. It has helped me put visual meaning to so many of my thoughts, to my past and present and future....it has really been a wonder. And it is exhilarating to know that I have so much more to learn in this realm.

Aside from art journaling and a few small personal pieces, here is the first larger work that I created. There is a lot there - it's all fragments of key memories from my childhood. There is altered, distressed photo of me with my grandfather, one of the most important people in my life; an altered photo of his pocket watch, which he had for many years and was then handed down to me and which I gave to my husband on our wedding day; several photos of a major bridge that my grandfather engineered in Kiev; his handwriting a clip of a picture from a Russian fairy tale I loved; a drawing I did of birch trees like the one near our Kiev home - my first "real" drawing in years"; and more. Yes, it's kind of busy, but it makes me happy to look at it.















This next one was inspired by someone I cared deeply about, who passed away last fall. The Hebrew writing here says "Hakarat Hatov", which translates to "recognizing the good". This phrase has been so meaningful to me lately. The friend who inspired this piece truly lived every moment with a deep recognition for all the good in life, in spite of tremendous obstacles. I hung this piece in my living room as a reminder to myself to always be thankful, to recognize everything that is good no matter what else is going on, and to teach my children to live this way too.


















So there it is - I started :-).