mixing my media

hi there,

this is a 'catching-up' post, about an experiment i performed at the beginning of this month, with a little help from my big brotherly friend G......

i chose a couple of images i had printed on canvas, they had been dumped somewhere in my new studio because i found them to be rather sterile and uninspiring, i guess that's what happens when you mix your media the wrong way lol! canvas is for painting, or maybe collaging, but covered with the flat colored 'coat' of a photograph it looks incredibly boring, as i found out. have been tinkering with the idea of painting and collaging over them, trying to add some layers of depth and interest, but somehow i never felt brave enough to apply the first stroke.

instead i decided to take them on a creative journey, to place them in different surroundings in order to literally broaden their horizons...:-) chose 2 canvases with manikins in them and decided to add one of my earlier prints on brushed metal (the one titled: 'eye of the beholder') just to find out what that one would look like, if seen from a more 'natural' viewpoint.

so there we went, on that sunny morning, G and i, accompanied by our 'props' instead of the dogs...:-)) (i also took along a large mirror, inspired as i was/have always been by Anish Kapoor's amazing work with reflections)

here are the 6 most interesting images i created that day by mixing my media:

this one is about the burnt/torn diagonal of the image connecting with the tracks in the grass, created by my electric scooter, crossing the shadow the canvas casts to the left, leading out of the frame

this one was done with the mirror, cropped to a different, more appropriate format than my usual 16x9. also all about diagonal and triangular lines and shapes.

this is a vertical close-up, connecting and contrasting the trail of rust in the image with the burnt remains of a barbecue party. in summer our little 'peninsula' is littered with them....

here is the same image (the brushed metal print) with some more context and contrasts, provided by the blurred blue lake and its horizon in the background, and the slightly tilted/elevated position of the object. (i had to literally bend over backwards to manage this POV lol!)

and finally two scenes with my favorite Muse

this one is soft focused, with the vertical lines of the grasses crossing the diagonal shadow lines of the blinds on the canvas and the grass plumes and sprigs almost blending in with the shadow branches (original iphone shot taken in the same area....) of the image. 

this one completely different, the canvas at the left side of the image, taking up two horizontal thirds of the frame, and the grasses in front, occupying one horizontal third of the frame, with one blade in the middle reaching up toward the manikin's throat.

ps inspired by your latest post i tried to 'frame' my images by adding borders (small and large ones) , but i don't really like the way they create distance between the image and the viewer. and besides, i have already 'framed' the canvases naturally, lol! for now, a 1px border seems more than enough to lift the images from their background.