Collaging for the Stage

You do some funny stuff for the theater...

Last week was a big push on my drafting board to finish some collaged jewelry for Kitchen Dog Theater's annual fund raiser party Hooch & Pooch.  (Great name huh?)  At the same time I made a few pieces as little presents for an up-coming family event.  So my studio is still filled - FILLED! - with little bitty clips of paper.

Collage is a messy art!

My studio... my board under assault by bits of paper.

Here you can see my board pretty well buried in paper... no drawing going on today!  (Tea drinking, yes, drawing, no.)

More scraps of paper...

This necklace is based on a Kimbell Art Museum brochure for a middle eastern art show some years ago (I save paper dangit).  The image is of Persian ceramic tiles showing a romantic garden picnic... from which I cut tiny portions of the various floral motifs for the main discs on this necklace.  Other papers come from leftover Chinese soap wrappers and itty bitty catalogue illustrations of William Morris floral designs.

And more scraps of paper!

More collage...  Here are a few pins made from a reproduction of an old British game board (a bit like Bingo, I think) and the beginning of a tiny framed art piece where - unlikely as it seems - Chagall and Keith Herring designs will work happily together.

Below - more pins made from bejeweled Mexican Bingo images.

Some of my favorites.

Missed your chance to win a piece of my jewelry at Hooch & Pooch?  Donations to Kitchen Dog Theater still cheerfully accepted!  I'll make ya a pin custom as a Thank You.

(Interested in collage jewelry?  HERE's a Squidoo page I made on the topic.)

New Squidoo Page

As a followup to that last POST on collage jewelry, I just wanted to announce a new Squidoo page on (what a coincidence!) making collage jewelry.  HERE.

The "Eye" pendant, by me, copyrighted even if you could find all the weird bits to make it.

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.