The Collage Miniaturist

“The key is not to imitate life,
but to create it anew.”

— Lalo Schifrin
 

Although I spent eight hours outside on the miniature featured below, it required too long an indoor refinement period for it to earn a plein-air designation. The process is what matters, and who’s keeping score anyway? The limitations of paper demand a process not overly dependent on what I actually see. So I put imitation aside and follow my Third Rule of Collage: “Intuition is worthy of your trust.”

Working in the sun dries my paste, but I found myself looking for shade when I got to DayCrest Farm. I picked a spot with plenty of depth that overlooked rows of poppies, lavender, and sunflowers, and I took a reference shot on my feet. When I sat down with my rig, I could barely see the lavender. Moving nearer, a new composition photo was closer to what I wanted, and I boosted the hues as I picked my colored papers.

I had mounted an old, ruined book cover as a substrate. It bled upward into a crumpled sky wet with paste. The unusual effect set a tone for the interpretation, which I carried forward with a more active horizon and a bold base of color. I liked how an accident helped tie the whole thing together back in the studio. When I integrated the dappled sky with moody clouds and represented analogous flowers, the top linked itself chromatically to this horizontal band of lavender. The additional poppies at the base provided a fitting contrast with my chosen shades of green. Except for the unexpected bleed, all color comes from the scrounged paper itself, with no added paints or pigments.
 

Poppy Solstice
scrounged paper collage by J A Dixon
vintage book cover on structure
outside start, DayCrest Farm, KY