It's funny to me how we all made all sorts of collages & other mixed media art as children, but as we become adults even creative people sometimes seem to let that process go by the wayside. The first mixed media art I was really drawn to as an adult was by Cindy Wunsch, whose work I saw at Shorelines Gallery in San Diego, California. I bought a couple of cards featuring prints of her work & have them framed & hanging in my house. There is something that appeals to me about seeing a piece of art & knowing you need to look closer… seeing a bit of something else behind the paint & finding yourself drawn in to investigate.
Efforts at creating this type of mixed media shine a light on my love of process, of doing something repetitive that I can become lost in. Painting bits of paper with Mod Podge & sticking them randomly on canvas seems to take me back to childhood, at least in part because I always wind up with a thin layer of glue covering everything.
As much as I love that process, it is still a challenge for me to paint on the resulting paper-covered background. I’m very much a planner & have a hard time switching gears in the middle of a project. Just one more effort at creative growth, I suppose.
Another layer of Cindy Wunsch’s work that I love is her use of stamps, lettering & sayings. As a child I adored stamps, so any excuse to buy some as an adult will surely make me happy. I also love quotes- handy words strung together and carried around in your pocket- words that say what you mean, often in a better way than you can find. I tried this stamping process on my red bird mixed media piece (shown above) after realizing it needed something else to finish it… it turns out that a quote by Maya Angelou, added with a set of stamps I might have owned as an eight year old, was just right.
Where do the words come from that are placed on the canvas?
ReplyDeleteHi Linda, I used alphabet stamps purchased at Michael's directly on the acrylic paint. The quote is by Maya Angelou.
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