Collages: Cloudy Eye, and Collage with 3 Men and a House Boat
original digital collage “Cloudy Eye” by JRC
original digital collage with “3 Men and House Boat” by JRC
Two more original collages. One I enjoy, another not so much. Let's start with the lesser...I wanted to do some pieces not using any comic book elements, so I started the one above using old maps on a black background. The blue-green orb that dominates the image was a map of the Eastern Mediterranean by the American Colony Photo Department (found on Library of Congress); The 'iris' at the middle is off the star chart of the Celestial Atlas of Flamsteed, featuring a crab, from 1795 (via the Public Domain Review); The horizontal purple strip is excerpted from a "Hotel Zone Map of NYC" found on the Digital Collection website of the New York Public Library. The vertical strip on the viewer left was taken from a photo by Harris & Ewing, from the Library of Congress website. Over the top of all that is a badly deteriorated 1934 map of Mission Santa Cruz CA, again found on the Library of Congress.
This piece reminds me of what we'd call, in college, Hotel Art, in that is seems to do nothing other than look pretty. I mean, that's not bad thing, but there's just something wishy-washy about it. I do like the black bit at the center, which to me looks like the Rolling Stones 'zipper' cover designed by Andy Warhol for the cover of "Sticky Fingers".
"3 Men and a House Boat" starts with "Map Plans for Investigation of Campaign Expenditures", the photo by Harris & Ewing from the vertical strip of eyes in Cloudy Eye. This collage came out a lot more illustrative than I thought to work consciously, but I like what I've got.
A lot of it was remixed by directly manipulating the base picture in Gimp: flipping parts, colorizing, duplicating sections, and such to break down the identifiable consistency of the picture.
The three circles/planets: the one on the viewer left is a picture of dancers found on the Library of Congress, made by repeatedly rotating sections by keeping it shape intact. The center orb was made off the base image, repeating it, making it opaque, and pulling each level just a bit off register. The one on the right is a slightly recomposed picture, "A Pretty Residence Spot at Benicia Calif" by Frank Stumm, from the Library of Congress.