Tag Archives: Rotem Amizur

A figurative and an interior collage, for more fun

I wandered off on my own again and created a collage based on a photo from ‘back in the day’ when two of my little sisters, Susan and Mary, were swimming in the back yard pool (pre Hurricane Camille). I’ve always loved that photo and had earlier done a fairly abstracted version on the iPad. After my collage class, I decided to do a second version using the paired color technique I’d learned from Rotem Amizur.

A hard thing about this method is that Rotem encourages us to use whatever papers we still have on hand, rather than painting new ones that hew more closely to the reference underlying the image we’re trying to create. Here, that hot pink on the two girls is jarring, but . . . whatever.

I’ve been trying to paint more interiors lately, so I decided to try a collage construction based on the view of our living room from the kitchen table. The first cut was pretty dreary, so I layered up the background with a bright pink. Granddaughter Maya was around as I was critiquing the first version and she too agreed I needed a hot pink wall in the background, rather than the lavender I had already used.

Living room in wonky colors and with an imagined painting on the wall beyond the windows.

Catching up with collages posted elsewhere.

With more apologies to my Facebook friends who’ve probably seen these before, I want to post some collages I produced during a zoom-based workshop with Rotem Amizur, a fabulous Israeli artist. Key tasks included painting two contrasting layers of acrylic paint on each of a large stack of paper; selecting three or four sets of lighter and darker papers to represent light and shadow in different areas of the reference photo; and then cutting and arranging pieces of those papers to interpret the reference image in a collage. Here are two sets of paper selections I used in a couple of exercises:

Rotem had us select a couple of ‘old master’ paintings to use as our references. I started with a portrait of Matisse, followed by his portrait of his wife. I did one of Matisse and then a number of variations of Mrs. Matisse, some looking at the reference image or an earlier collage and others relying on just my memory of what Mrs. Matisse looked like. It was fun to get wilder and more abstract with each iteration, as we had to come up with a focal theme that didn’t duplicate an earlier collage.

And here are a few progress shots, showing the method of pinning the paper pieces, which were glued to each other in the final stage.

This was an exceedingly fun and challenging workshop — so good that I took a second one from Rotem a few months later. See the next post!