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i love the definitions she brings up:
when you make it your own, it´s art
when you follow directions, it´s craft
“When you follow directions, as you would a recipe, or copy a project from a magazine – that is craft. Personalizing, interpreting, processing through your own filters, is art.”
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i´ve done a lot of crafting in my younger years… knitting, cross-stitching, silk painting… mostly “by recipes” —
it was only when i came to collaging (via detecting the tool of rubber stamps) that i got a totally new feeling – that feeling of freedom in creating…
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when i start to make a journal page, an altered book spread etc. the first thing is making a background of my own… though i have gathered a lot of wonderful scrapbook papers, i mostly end up with painting/dying my own papers – most of the time in vibrant colors. i just can´t create in brown (though i often admire how others can!). it´s also hard for me to create in black/white! i always have my fingers at vivid colors (often with complementary accents) in the shortest of times..
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like many of us i´m a collector. of almost everything! (michelle speaks of the wonderful collage sheets out there… great vintage faces etc… i have bought quite some of them – but… i started to give them away, i feel they are “not me”… and – as she said – i´m often bored by the over-usage of them; they lost their freshness…)
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in the piece above you can see some things i always collected: f.e. postal stamps. i have tons of them (and i mean: tons!!). too many actually, so often i don´t find what i´m searching for;))
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another hoarded element: old book pages… (fine, if in foreign languages or the old german style of letters) – on lazy days i just dye heaps of pages in various colors to have some dry & ready for every occasion… here: to print on some text
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and i was always drawn to film strips; i´m happy i didn´t throw away the rolls which happend to turn out black (got light in the camera…).
here i used one as a base for printed muybridge pictures (another all-time-favorite!)
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this piece was made in january/february… the year was young and i wanted to make something with a “positive twist”…
started with the dancing woman in two sizes (company: moon rose)… i remembered the dancing woman from eadweard muybridge, which is very similar to that stamp… wanted to enforce the feeling of that “pictures in motion” by adding them to a film strip…
the words came along by themselves (yes, recalled from my brain database;)) – of course one of my numerous alphas had to be involved…
found by chance these postal stamps (the bloom seems to repeat the hand position of the woman: click to enlarge, so you might see it)…
some more stamping of details & done!
