Gayle Gerson : Artist » blog

Self-Portrait

ggerson — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 19:03:27 +0000

I assigned a self-portrait in my last class at the Art Center during the Spring session. This was my attempt to fulfill the assignment. I photo-shopped an image of my face, printed it out and added it to a print out of the Mona Lisa. I like to print out images that I plan to use in collages on acid free sketch paper. It has some good absorbency and heft. From there it just developed as I added photos and other ephemera. It has an Italian look to it that I like.

Encaustics for the Bees

ggerson — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 01:27:00 +0000

I just finished 3 12×12 box frame encaustic collage pieces for the Palisade International Bee Festival which happens on April 16th and April 17, 2010. The event is a response to the continuing crisis of hive decline among our most precious agricultural resource, bees. This art is part of an exhibition in conjunction with the Bee Festival at the Blue Pig Gallery in Palisade, Colorado.
Encaustic is an ancient art medium made from bees wax. The modern version also contains damar varnish and ready-made colors. I like to use collage elements such as papers, copper fragments, jewelry findings and beads which I either embed in the encaustic or coat with the encaustic to create a soft surface.
In “Bee Grid”, I included a part of a wasp’s hive, original drawings, and painted and found papers.
In “Buzz”, I used magazine advertisements from medical marijuana stores to build up the spiral plant forms, hence the title.
These pieces are meant to hang together, although they can be sold separately: $500 a piece, $750 for two and $1100 for all three.

Finally I Can Spill the Beans

ggerson — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:16:55 +0000

In late November, the Colorado Council on the Arts and Colorado Friends of Culture commissioned me to do three paintings to present to the winners of the Governor’s Art Award. I was to do one for Telluride, Colorado, one for Creede, Colorado and one to hang in the Governor’s office in Denver. This was great and scary news for me. However, there was one catch: I couldn’t tell anyone.
The Council wanted to keep the winners a secret until February 26th, 2010 which happens to be Art Advocacy Day when they would be presented to the mayors of the winning towns.
I enjoyed doing these pieces using promotional materials for Telluride, Creede and Colorado in general as my base collage and embellishing with paint and painted papers. For Telluride, because we are frequent visitors, I was able to use my own photos which is my favorite collage method.
The ceremony was great fun although pulling black drapes off my paintings as they were presented was anxiety-producing in the extreme. My nerves were quelled by the many nice people I met there and the positive comments.
I have included photos taken by my husband, George, of the ceremony.

Tackling a Portrait

ggerson — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:02:27 +0000

I am fairly sure that I have finished a portrait project for a Blue Pig Gallery Show which opens on January 22, 2010. The assignment was to create a portrait of a local community leader/personality in the artist’s usual medium. I chose Dave Fishell, a historian and story-teller who is well known in Grand Junction for his lively presentations. I wanted to use old photos and images to collage his portrait in sepia tones. Dave kindly allowed me to use his book, The Grand Heritage – A Photographic History of Grand Junction, for much of the source material for this collage. I am including only a small slice of it in this post, so as not to spoil the opening exhibit.

Mini Dotties

ggerson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:34:45 +0000

In response to The Blue Pig Gallery’s annual miniature show, I decided to do some encaustics on little 5×5 boxes. I knew I wanted the common theme of dots, so I made dots, using my magic Krink applicator, on many different pieces of scraps of painted paper and encaustic pieces. I started out with flowers in pots, but that quickly evolved into birds. As I was allowing the pieces to come together with wax, jewelry findings and the aforementioned dotted papers, phrases kept on popping into my head, such as, “Take Me To Your Leader” or “I Read Somewhere That Birds Are Descended from Dinosaurs”. So I decided those phrases needed to be the titles of the mini paintings. Of course, I decided that some of these titles were way too quirky not to be part of the art work and so I bought some little letter stamps and added the phrases to the face of the works, again using that Krink–which applies well to slick surfaces. This project was a great transition from the very meticulous work of the forest panels. Now my head is clear to pursue other forms of forest collages.

Photos of the Mesa State Panels in Place

ggerson — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:04:24 +0000

Here are a couple of photos of the panels I completed as they are hanging in the third floor lounge area of the new Academic Classroom Building at Mesa State College.

Big Commission Completed

ggerson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:53:00 +0000

Well, it took most of the summer, but I have completed the four panels that the Colorado Council on the Arts commissioned for the new Mesa State classroom building. Each collage is 6 feet long by 2 feet wide, done on a cradled board. In preparation to do each one, I took photos at four favorite recreation venues around Grand Junction: The Riverfront Trail, Serpent’s Trail on the Monument, Hawthorne Park and Lincoln Park in the city. I used these photos (manipulated via Photoshop in a myriad of ways) as a base collage to which I added paint, tissue paper, images of animals and people from old magazines, and even snake skin in two of the pieces. At first glance, the art looks like a regular landscape, although the medium is difficult to pin down. Upon closer inspection, the viewer realizes that the perspectives are off, the shadows are surreal, things are either bigger or smaller than they should be and the placement of many elements would be unlikely in real life. I have created a fantasy world based on images from the real world. I love this new way of making art and I have plans for other pieces using the same technique. I have included thumbnails of each piece below.