Collage Jewelry

As part of Kitchen Dog Theater's fund raiser, I made some collage jewelry.  I used to make a lot of larger collage work (the biggest being a 6' high Pegasus for Dallas' public art competition some years ago), but since I've gotten so busy with theater design I haven't had the time.  Collage is, as you might expect, time consuming.

But I've been enjoying these small scale works.  And they've been getting a good response too: this necklace literally sold off my board before I could even get it to Kitchen Dog.  (They got the check.)

"Mattise" necklace front - collage and found-jewelry base, by Clare Floyd DeVries

"Mattise" necklace rear - collage and found-jewelry base, by Clare Floyd DeVries

I love the free-wheeling aspect of collage, the purely intuitive response between one scrap of an image and the next.  

In this piece colors came first, fragments of anything really: soap wrappers, catalog illustrations, an insurance company flier, a photo of a mosaic.  Then I saw the red-red-red Matisse dining room wallpaper (with its lady).  It had to be followed by the perfect-shade-of-purple other Mattise woman.  The back side of the necklace, with its oyster shell-like gnarly texture seemed to demand muted shades of the front's vibrant colors.  Those paper fragments include more shards of mosaic and the flowers of William Morris wallpaper.