This past Friday was the Arts Club of Washington exhibit opening reception. Below are a few photos from the show:
D.C. Collage Scapes
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February 1st – 23rd, 2013
Arts Club of Washington
Map and Gallery Info
Opening Reception: Friday, February 1st, 2013 from 6:30p.m. – 9:00p.m.
Coyle’s “D.C. Collage Scapes” solo show will showcase her new series of landscape and cityscape collages that were inspired by D.C. The work includes scenes that depict hidden pockets of natural landscape in the city, as well as images of familiar landmarks, museums, and memorials. This will be the first time collages from the new series will be on display. “D.C. Collage Scapes” will also be Coyle’s first solo show in the District.
The landscape/cityscape series provides unique imagery of the city. Each work of art was handcrafted from magazine strips using Coyle’s “painting with paper” technique – where she manipulates paper in such a way that it resembles the brush strokes in a painting.
The exhibit is one of two concurrent solo shows being held at the Arts Club of Washington in February. The Arts Club of Washington promotes the visual, performing, and literary arts in D.C. The club hosts events in its historic I Street mansion, which was formerly the home of President James Monroe.
Air and Space Museum
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Here’s the last collage in the landscape/cityscape series. All twenty collages were completed roughly within twenty weeks last year. I started working on them in the summer and finished up in the fall.
And tomorrow I’ll drop off about a dozen or so of them at the Arts Club of Washington for my upcoming exhibit “D.C. Collage Scapes.”
Northern Virginia Magazine Blog Feature
Northern Virginia Magazine featured a blog post about my upcoming exhibit at the Arts Club of Washington – “D.C. Collage Scapes.” The posting, “Collage Art Makes a Comeback,” focuses on my creative process as well as the series of collages that will be in my upcoming February exhibit.
The Washington Monument at Sunset
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I’ve created a few collages of the Washington Monument over the past couple of years, but here’s the first one of the monument at sunset. This makes me think that it might be fun to do a series of D.C. landmarks using arbitrary color…
Anyway, I just have one more scape collage from this series to share.
Old Town Boat
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And here’s the finished collage. There’s only two more collages in this series that I have yet to post. And once I have, I’ll be taking a bit of a breather from all of my art-making so I can relax and recharge my creativity.
2012 Reflections
It seems as though life just gets busier and busier with each passing year. I am so grateful that I had so many amazing art opportunities in 2012. So, to celebrate the upcoming New Year, here are the top 10 highlights from 2012:
1) My artwork was accepted into a museum’s permanent collection for the first time. “Flamingo Dancers” and “Mallard Duck” are now owned by the Ward Museum.
2) Second-ever museum group exhibit. The first time my work was on display in a museum was in 2008 at the Smithsonian Ripley Center.
3) Artwork and article published in an arts anthology on DC artists. This was the first time I was part of project that was funded by a Kickstarter campaign.
4) Several collages were accepted to be in an upcoming book on Wildlife Art.
5) First group exhibit in New England – “Strange Glue.”
6) First solo show at a convention center – and first time having my name show up on a sign.
7) Had a large body of work on display in a solo show in a beautiful gallery in Manassas, VA.
8) Had my work published in several newspapers and online publications. It’s always fun to have people discover your work through unexpected press.
9) Redesigned my entire portfolio website – something that dominated my time during the month of December. It took a lot of work, but overall, I’m glad I finally did it. The last redesign happened about three years ago.
10) Decided to take a break from exhibits next year so I can take it easy, get more rest, and experiment more with my artwork. The problem with having lots of exhibitions is that you find yourself making work for upcoming shows, and not spending much time on exploring and experimenting with different projects and techniques that can help your work grow.
Anyway, I hope everyone has a safe and Happy New Year! 🙂
Downtown Shopping
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It’s always interesting comparing my finished collages to the pictures of the sketches I did. The work of art really does change through the whole process. And it seems to change a little with every layer of paper added. Anyway, you can see that this piece is more colorful than the previous landscape/cityscape collages I’ve done in this series – which have more earth tones. I suppose I was getting a little tired of working with grays, browns, blues, and greens, and had fun changing things up.
Anyway, I’m off to do some late-night art-making. And happy almost-December!
National Gallery
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My new landscape/cityscape series has given me an opportunity to intensely study my gray color palette surroundings in DC. When I decided to collage the National Gallery, I realized I needed to change things up a bit. Thus I created a composition where you can see bits of the building behind several trees. This added a little more color, and made the layout more interesting to tackle.
The Woods
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There’s a lot of gray in DC, which has worked its way into several of my cityscape collages. So I decided to change things up in my series a bit by doing another natural landscape. There are clumps of natural landscape here and there around the city, and I based this piece off of a series of photographs I took. I had fun incorporating a lot of texture in the ground.