IDEA'S DEVELOPING

I have been looking at more of Cooke's work and discovered this piece of her watercolour, ink and ice paper creation. It has got me thinking that perhaps I could use my original idea of using a photo as the base of my works but work back over into the photo with watercolour to pull my work together.




Earthscape Group

Mixed Media on 4- 5x7 stretched canvases.
[rice papers, acrylic, inks, metallic powders, collage]

MY THOUGHTS ON ELIS COOKE

BLOG ADDRESS - http://www.elis-cooke.com/

I am completely fascinated and in love with Cooke's work. Cooke is a mixed media artist who works alot with ink, watercolours, rice paper and tissue paper on canvas to create her unique and intruging designs.

Her pieces are of an experimental nature that develope as she adds layer and layer of different media.

ELIS COOKE

ALCHEMY


Mixed Media [handmade paper, metallic pigments, acrylic] on 8x8 stretched canvas

" WISE WOMAN II "


Handmade Paper Mixed Media Collage by Mixed Media Collage Artist Elis Cooke ( from the Feminine Wills series )
Media: Handmade and hand cast paper, polymer clay, collage elements, acrylic paint on stretched canvas.



Interpretation Of Art

~ The heart is as fragile as a feather yet so powerful it can catch a wind of a breath and fly into eternity

~ the softness of one’s knowing is sheltered behind the layers of toughened skin

~ purity of enquiry will loosen the aged presumptions and unravel angel feathers in disguise

Secod Series Idea's ALCHEMY

As a second piece of work I have been playing around with the idea of birds in their first stages of life, prefferably eggs. I am thinking about creating another series of photographs on canvas this time of a nest and eggs and perhaps putting other things in with the eggs such as bones or a cracked egg or empty shell. I have a picture in my head of how I want the series to look. I am thinking of setting it up so that I can adjust and work with lighting. I want the photo's to have as warm light on them but still that dark shadowiness.

I want to experiment a bit with this idea and the photoraphy stage of it, such as i could photograph a person holding the nest and work with photoshop. (see photo below)

First Series of Idea's ALCHEMY

The beauty of ink work and watercolours is something that I would very much like to work with. I want to create a series of canvas works using a mixture of different media. These would include photography, ink, watercolours, rice paper collaging and turps rubbing.

I am thinking of taking some landscape photos to use as the background of my pieces of work and perhaps fading them a bit before putting them on canvas so that my top layer will be the main focus. I have been looking at the swallow's flying formation and their beautiful and precise way of moving together would create a beautiful layer on my work if I dotted one of their various flying patterns across the landscape.

Over this, turps rubbing a different colourful bird (but in black and white for turps rubbing), onto each canvas. Then using rice and tissue paper I could create the outline and shape of the bird.I found on Elis Cooke's blog the use of rice paper to create texture before applying water colours.

"I started collaging tissue and rice paper onto the canvas support. While it is still wet I like to introduce the paint [ink, watercolours] so it creeps into the papers creating cool mixtures and textures. Then i will let that dry and have an interesting surface to work on..."

I would then use a similar technique to Cooke's and would work water colours into the paper letting it seep into each other and using darker inks to create lines letting it run down the canvas. Then working back into it with watercolour pencils and gesso. (See art diary)

Here are some pictures from Cooke's blog:

I find myself contemplating on why I chose Lucid Dreaming. I never have dreams that I remember, maybe one dream in a whole two weeks. I often thought that there was something wrong and maybe I had done something to stop my mind from dreaming. I even had the silly belief that it was because of a dream catcher that I once broke. There was a dream catcher that had hung in the hallway but I only like the middle part of it, the part with the intriguing circle that had a spider web of strings crossing through the middle of it. There were bohemian beads and feathers hanging off it and it was this part that I loved. One day my attraction to it just about burst and cut the middle bit off and hung it over my bed where to this day it still hangs. I often think that I have angered someone by doing this and in return my dreams have been stolen from me. While this is sort of meaningless I think this is the reason that Lucid Dreaming was so attracting for me. It was something that has been denied to me and something that I have given up thinking about. When I opened my mind to the possibilities that I could achieve with this focus, I immediately started to have ideas of what I could do to communicate the focus.
To me Lucid Dreaming communicates the sense of subconscious and conscious thoughts that are continuously float around in the back of our minds but only surfaces when we surrender ourselves to our spiritual dream side. Such thoughts of freedom and belonging are constantly in the back of my mind and I feel that it often surfaces as my personal aesthetic.
The first photographs that I took for this focus was of birds. It was a subconscious act and I didn't realise that I was focusing on birds until I looked back through the photos. However I have not incorporated these bird images into any of my pieces of artwork for reasons that I am not sure of at the moment. I just havn't found the right place for them to go I think. While I was looking through the photos of birds however I found that alot of them had the bright afternoon sun in them. While I continued to look through the photos I felt the sense of freedom in each of them. Using this feeling I then progressed to take a number of photos of the sun and with it the beautiful crops that surround my house. The effect that the afternoon sun had on the crop plants created this beautiful dreaming sense as the outline of the plants was golden and light was shining. These became my backgrounds in my photos.

Another set of experimental photos that I took were at night however there was too much surrounding light and the photos didn't have the dark dream-like effect that I wanted. At first I wanted to work with the idea of torturing and bad dreams but then the aesthetic of freedom seemed to arise back in and I started to create the idea of a bird by using a fabric sheet around me to create wings almost. Again it wasn't planned and just happened to turn out that way.

In the end I decided that the idea of freedom would most likely emerge throughout whatever I did and so I started to experiment with photos to see what sort of dream I could create. The end result was the idea of myself in consciousness and the my birdlike self entering from the darkness and unknown part of my dream into the lucid dream. It is then once I have enetered the dream that I am free. I wanted to communicate the sense that the darkness in my works is the place that is left behind once our minds enter into the lucid dream. The darkness reflects both our consciousness and our previous state of mind (dream) that was occurring before that we are not aware of. It is then once we have entered into the lucid dream that our minds are free and can create what we fell most and want.

Focus - Lucid Dreaming

The focus I am working with is Lucid Dreaming. Lucid Dreaming is this state that we enter when in our subconscious minds and certain elements remain with us when we come back to consciousness. It is the state of being aware of our dreams. It is the images that enter our minds when we surrender ourselves to our inner thoughts when asleep. Thoughts and images, whether significant or not, emerge in our minds in the form of dreams. These dreams may carry with it a message or multiple meanings or might reflect our inner self, whether it is the struggles we face in daily life, the moments of euphoria we experience or perhaps the subconscious thoughts we have that we may never notice.