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Archive for July, 2025

Not plein air, but who’s keeping score?

Thursday, July 24th, 2025

“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

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July demands a shady spot to sit . . .

Wednesday, July 16th, 2025

“Gone were the stark boundaries that I work within from flower bed to flower bed. They were able to see beyond my critical eyes and into the natural beauty of nature. Where I see work, they saw peace. Where I see change, they saw beauty. As I began to see what they saw it changed everything for me. They created a glorious space full of color and shadow, depth and contrast.”
— Joanna Kirby

Garden Depths
collage en plein air by J A Dixon
7.0625 x 9.5625 inches
Plein Air Artists of Central Kentucky
at the Kirby gardens

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The art of legacy collage

Thursday, July 10th, 2025

“During the last two years at the Motherhouse, I made a real effort to ‘clean out,’ and organize everything. It was truly a freeing experience! However, I still had to decide what to do with what I wanted to keep. Around this time, I had attended the funeral of a friend who had commissioned three artworks to represent her life: ‘Body, Mind, and Spirit.’ I was immediately touched by this collage idea. From then until this writing, I have been working on my collages. I had planned to do only two: ‘Home and Family’ and ‘Ministry as a Dominican.’ My artist brought forth a third, and it is a perfect fit for my life.”
— Sister Mary Otho Ballard

Below is a triptych which represents of a type of artwork that I call “Legacy Collage.” My entry about a previous example from 2016 described the scenario of a person attempting to distinguish the difference between actual family heirlooms and other items marked for eventual disposal. Inevitably, some images and memorabilia would fall into a gray area between, and therein lies the potential for one or more collage compositions. If creatively preserved as wall-worthy artwork, they can remain meaningful into the future.

A retired Dominican Sister of Peace saw a collage triptych at the funeral of her friend. It was a grouping that I had collaboratively assembled with my late patron. Facing a terminal condition herself, Sister had been reducing her few possessions and arranged a commission for me to make a similar creation. She had lived an extraordinary life of educational and administrative service, including an extended ministry to serve the native people of Belize, but she was physically and spiritually detaching from all of it. Because Sister had taken a vow of poverty, her devoted nephew wanted to make an enduring memorial possible, and I was honored to accept the collage assignment.

Originally there were to be two panels — the first would document her life before convent, growing up as La Monda, part of a large, farm-based family in Kentucky. The second would be about her long and diverse life as a nun. When I took stock of all the designated ingredients, it became clear that this project would also need to be a triptych. The third panel would commemorate her active preparation for eternal life.

panel 1 ~ FORMATION ~ Farm and Family
panel 2 ~ VOCATION ~ Growth and Service
panel 3 ~ ASPIRATION ~ Love and Detachment

Sister and I worked together intermittently for nearly a year, bringing her vision into being. Her presence, wisdom, and peaceful soul have had a profound effect on my heart. It’s been one of the most personally rewarding experiences I’ve had as an artist. I met Sister’s nephew last year after the finished collages were delivered, and he was remarkably generous. As Christmas approached, her condition declined, My wife and I spent some time with Sister, but she struggled with clarity. She then asked her nephew to come for a visit and for me to be there to meet with them. He and I happened to arrive at her care center about the same time, only to learn that she had passed on a half hour before.