August is not only the harbinger of the first harvest, happy Lammas, only a little late to all of you. I hope you are enjoying the wonderful fruits of the planet. August also means the end of the annual ICAD art challenge. It is a pretty simple challenge on the surface, make a piece of art for 61 days on an index card. It is an opportunity to play, to experiment, to take chances and to not be afraid of failure. Mungo and i both participated this year. He did a really cool, very much appreciated project, a 'writer does art'. He laid out, and mapped out an image that was gridded out over all 61 cards. Than did free form writing around the marked out image. People read the art every day, and waited impatiently for the image. I imagine he will get around to posting it on his blog real zoo now.
Here are the last two pieces i did for ICAD, you can see all of them, sequentially at my art page, https://www.facebook.com/theartofgailelwell13/
 |
| For Those With Eyes to See |
 |
| Let the Day Begin |
Although i was a pretty consistent every day art maker before the challenge, i am also a 'butterfly', with many different projects going at once. Once i settled into small format collage as my medium of choice for ICAD i found the daily ritual was sharpening, focusing the way i was approaching the ideas and challenges of collage. This was/is too cool to give up. Tammy through Daisy Yellow of course encourages us all to continue with the daily practice, particularly through art journaling. This is of course a very good idea, but felt unsatisfying to me. The practical/ambitious part of me wants to make things that i can show or sell. So i hit upon a hybrid of sorts. I am already a book maker, i've played around with the idea of 'artist' books before, so the idea of a daily collage journal came about.
My hope is to sustain this project for an entire year, i'll be happy with completing August and will see what happens after that. The project is called Kalends; the format is 4.5 x 6", so it is roughly the same size i was working during the ICAD project. Each of the books will have between 14 and 15 signatures, each signature will have 8 pages. The paper is a heavy weight, wet or dry media, Canson 9 x 12". By folding and tearing i will get one signature out of each page. I am creating four pages every day; each signature contains two days of collage. Due to the nature of hand book binding the four pages of each day do not always flow together. A design continuity challenge to say the least.
Here are the images for the first signature, in the order you would see them bound in a book.
 |
I will share more later with you,
Morgainne, aka Gail
P.S. Images of Mungo's piece
