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August 19, 2005

Artist Trading Cards

I've talked about these before, but I've finished the series I was working on, finally photographed them, and now they're ready to share.

These are editions 1-9 of the series. It's actually a series of ten cards, but the sheets only hold nine. Closeups of all ten follow in the extension of this entry

I was inspired by the date of the next Moscow-area exchange being in September. Autumn is the time when this part of the world starts to go to sleep. When life dies out, providing the foundations for spring's new birth. And we refer to later parts of the human lifetime as being the "autumn years," so I wanted to capture that too. Basically, my main goal was to try to express the melancholy that I always experience in the fall.

Being the artist/geek that I am, I knew I could find help in Shakespeare, and boy did I. All of the works are based on/use portions of Sonnet XXX, included here in its entirety:

Sonnet XXX

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste;
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight;
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Sonnet XXX Series

About the cards.

It's hard to tell from the photographs, but the background is actually gold acrylic on watercolor paper. (The shimmers don't show up well.) Cards 1-5 have more variation in the background because I painted straight onto the paper. I diluted the paint I used on cards 6-10, so the background on those is much lighter and more uniform.

The leaves and flowers are from my extensive collection of pressed stuff (all collected and pressed by me). And may I say that I really, really like the effects of the translucence of some of the flower petals, especially over text. To keep the plant material from breaking/flaking/rubbing off/peeling, I completely covered each piece with a dusty gold tulle, which also has sparkly bits that don't show up well in the pictures. But boy does it shimmer in the sunlight.

The sonnet bits are printed on ivory parchment paper, and my one semi-regret is that I didn't fix the print before I glued things on. The glue is what caused the fading and smearing and color change (the words were black rather than red). So areas that got more glue are smearier. I say semi-regret because I can't decide whether or not I like the effect.

One/Ten