“Moon”   Mixed media collage on cradled board 6×6 inches

I cleaned up my studio yesterday and found little odds and ends that prompted me to put together this little collage.  I like the tiny buddha resting beneath a vintage glass watch face, and a fish shaped piece of obsidian on top of a sterling silver fish.  I don’t like the hand-lettered brass plate that says “moon,” but looks like “moo”.  That really bothers me and I will probably eventually pry it off and replace it.  I suppose I could just add a plastic cow, and make it “The cow jumped over the moon” then the “moon – moo” plate would work just fine.  Actually in person you can easily read it as “moon,” so it isn’t really that bad!  The fun part was using CitraSolv concentrate on a magazine page to create the background.  That was fun, but smelly.  Not a bad smell, but overpowering after a while.  The background still smells faintly of oranges.  I had been wanting to try thisfor quite a while, but could never find CitraSolv.  My Safeway had it and I immediately bought a bottle and came home and started trying it out on different printed materials.  I guess National Geographic is the best, but I didn’t have any of those so I tried it on some junk mail catalogues and it worked pretty good. I also used a small book with slick colorful pages and I found some images made by the CitraSolv that were fascinating, so I brought them out by painting them in with gouache and acrylic.  Kind of strange-looking, but that was the image created by CitraSolv on the inked page.

 This is about 4×4 inches.  The reddish spots in each corner are just ceramic weights to hold it down for photography.  I don’t have any meaning for the painting, it was completely on the page after the CitraSolv dried, I just painted it in.

 Another CitraSolv with images that appeared after the page was dry.  I painted them in with gouache and acrylic.  Interesting process.