Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 6pm – 10pm
National Airport, Historic Terminal A
I’m excited to announce that I’ve donated my “Strolling in the Park” and “Figure Landscape” collages to an upcoming charity art auction called PawCasso. The event is taking place on November 3rd, and raises money for Homeward Trails Animal Rescue. You can find out more about what’s up for auction, as well as get tickets to the event, by visiting their website.
Back when I was in college, I worked on collages made from magazine strips in my free time. I was studying painting at the time, but I still tried to make time for collage. I also often tried to work in collage with my paintings, and this piece is an excellent example of just that.
To make this piece, I used two different canvases. One of them was stretched, while the other wasn’t. I created two paintings on both canvases, and then cut up the canvas that wasn’t stretched and stitched the pieces of the painting onto the stretched canvas. Thus I created a collage of two paintings. The piece was made with acrylic paint, some magazine strips that were adhered to the canvas, and thread.
Here’s a collage that I made back in high school, “Rebellion.” It was part of the series of collages I made at that time that really inspired the overall drive and direction of my work over the years. At that time, I was focussing on cutting and pasting paper while looking for solid colors and patterns in magazines. Then I manipulated the paper in such a way to create the shadows and highlights of the figure. I also remember that I really enjoyed cutting up the type that’s being used for the background here.
Here’s a piece I made a couple months ago. It was for a fellow artist and Elon alum. I realized I hadn’t posted this one yet – so here it is!
At the moment I’m taking a break with making new collages, but once I get back to work I’ll make sure I post any new pieces.
Here’s one of the holiday commissions I completed a couple months ago. My client wanted me to make a collage of her friend with his grandson. Since this piece wasn’t the smallest size I work in, it wasn’t as difficult to collage two figures on the 9″x12″ area. However, since 9″x12″ is still somewhat small, it was a bit of a challenge to get the likeness down properly for the grandson. I did have a bit of fun collaging all those colorful badges on the grandfather’s jacket.
I have a few more collages that I completed this year that I’ll post in the next couple of weeks. Anyway, I hope everyone is having a great December!
I like the story behind this collage: Recently the guy who owns the domain megancoyle.com contacted me. I wanted that domain when I first put my website together, but had to settle with megancoyle.com since another Megan Coyle had a site up and running on megancoyle.com. So the owner contacted me, telling me that his client, another Megan, no longer used her website. Thus the web address wasn’t being used and was pointing to an error page, although the owner was still paying money for the domain. So he offered to do a trade – he’d transfer the domain to my account if I made a collage for him.
Above is the collage that I made for him. The challenge with this piece was that it was one of my smaller sized collages, and I wasn’t doing a portrait of one, but two people. I had to cut the magazine strips pretty small, but I’m pleased that it came together in the end.
And here’s the finished piece – as you can see it’s much different than the first progress picture. When my client reviewed progress images of this one, she decided she wanted Nancy wearing a dark jacket instead of blue. She also made a few suggestions here and there. Her feedback was pretty helpful with shaping this into a Nancy portrait that looks more like Nancy.
I’m kind of excited about the idea of making a series of political leader collages, especially since I live in the DC area. We shall see how that goes when I get to it…
And now I’m off to work on my children’s book illustrations as well as another portrait for a client. It’s snowing like crazy outside – good weather for staying in and making artwork!
And here’s the finished piece. You’ll notice that it looks much different than the last progress picture. My client supplied me with a low res photograph taken with a cell phone camera. After a bit of dialogue back and forth between us, the portrait began to change bit by bit as I merged elements from other photographs that the client sent. Eventually, this was the result.
Anyway, I’m off to continue working on another commission – when it rains, it does indeed pour. And sometimes I wish I could clone myself so I could work on all the projects that are on my “to do” list.
And I’ve finished the Alice Childress quote piece. For X-mas, I received a light-kit and a nice Nikon camera, so now my collage pictures should look much brighter and more detailed. “Snowflakes” is the first collage I’ve taken pictures of with my new camera and kit.
Anyway, I hope everyone had a fun holiday!
It’s been a busy week. I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, and unfortunately I didn’t get around to making as much artwork as I wanted to–although this weekend I should have plenty of studio time.