Collage Watercolors

I created these watercolors for an Art Tag series on the theme of GERMINATION with the Peninsula Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art.

In an Art Tag, each person creates an artwork and shares it with a partner. You consider the artwork you received as you make your second work. You then pass your second work onto the same person you shared your first work with. They take it into account as they make their third work. The group convenes to share their third works–everyone brings the two works they received from their partner and their final work to discuss. At that final Art Tag meeting, each person shares their initial ideas for the series (or if not a series, their first work), and how their partner’s works influenced their next pieces.

For this series, I wanted to incorporate some cyanotypes I had made at a Northern California Caucus event at Djerassi Artist Residency. I also wanted to use a transfer process with mat gel medium to incorporate other photographic images into my work.

Using the mat medium, I created translucent transfers of images I found in Bon Appetit magazine–an asparagus spear, some figs, a lemon, and a ramp. They along with a cyanotype of a plant at Djerassi were laid on a fluid watercolor foundation for my first work. Once I applied them, I needed to cover the watercolor surface with acrylic paints to bring the watercolor surface texture in line with the acrylic gel medium. I’ve always worked in oil or watercolor, so this was a little discomforting. Once I delivered the work to my partner Judy Johnson Williams, I opened the artwork from Ann Ingraham to see what she sent me.

Ann’s work was a beautiful line drawing of a circular undulating grid, emanating from a real seed at the center. Like my cyanotype, her work indexed a real plant form. Also like me, circles figured prominently in the composition. The grid reminded me of my 2002 and 2008 watercolors based on a grid, and I decided to return to a semi-gridded composition for my second work and use less acrylic than I had in the first work. The last work includes a watercolor drawing of an indigeneous plant I happened upon on a backpacking trip in the Olympic Peninsula in Washington this summer.