Category: Scapes

A couple of years ago I completed a collage of the Air Force Memorial for a landscape/cityscape exhibit at the Arts Club of Washington. Just the other day, I decided to revisit this familiar subject matter by completing a smaller collage of the unique memorial.

I’m really beginning to enjoy making these smaller collages. They give me a chance to explore more subjects since they don’t take nearly as long to complete as the larger sizes I work in. However, sometimes they can take a while – it all depends on how complex they are.

I decided to revisit my landscape/cityscape series by putting together this collage. Working on this piece made me want to explore other natural landscapes. So perhaps a new series will be underway? We shall see…I’m beginning to gather inspiration for a couple new animal collages that I plan to make in the next few weeks.

Sunsets are always a fun subject to tackle – there are so many colors you can work with. I really enjoyed working on this piece, and I decided to incorporate bits and pieces of texture along with the usual solid colors. Over the past few years I’ve completed a couple other sunset collages, and I’ve noticed that all of them involve bodies of water. Perhaps the next one will be more of a landscape or just focus on buildings.

Here’s a study of the Washington Monument that I completed last night. As an artist living in the Washington, DC area, I’m often inspired by my surroundings. Every once in a while I’ll tackle familiar sites and landscapes when I decide to take a break from my animal or people portraits.

My next piece will most likely be another still life study. My current series of still life collages has definitely been a learning experience. I’m finding different ways to get excited about a subject matter that in the past I often tried to avoid.

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.”

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.

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!

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.