Elizabeth Regina
July 31st, 2006I finished my layer on the 4th collage in the collage round robin, and like what I see. Again I found this layer difficult, I feel like I moan about each collage that comes through the door. I think that’s part of the challenge in collaborative art, to work with whatever someone else has created. It’s different in altered books and such because you don’t actually work with whatever someone else has done, you just add your work to the book. I had the collage open on my desk for the last month, daring me to change it, add to it, transform it in some way. These last few days the collage has been clipped to the table, like a prisoner, unable to escape. Maybe it was me that felt unable to escape ‘though.
art by Barbara, Stacie and Annette
The words ‘Number One’ had been stamped over and over all around the collage, but I couldn’t understand where the acetate reading ‘E=MC2′ (squared) came into play. I thought about it, trying to work out how the two were connected. Finally I decided they weren’t so took the acetate sticker off the page .
The ‘Number One’ kept rolling around in my head and suddenly I had a vision of Queen Elizabeth pop into it too, so I looked her up, read a bit about her, found a load of images and printed them out. However, laying them on the collage, they seemed to be lacking a focal point. So then I took one image, where she didn’t look too bad (she wasn’t an attractive woman, was she?), enlarged it, and that worked for me. I then stamped the letter ER on either side of her. Although the image was resting on top of one of the rubber stamped images, it looked a bit like it was floating so I needed to ground her on something suitably opulent. I got out my gold leaf and gave her a base, sealed it with Shelac and then used rub-on transfers for the final ER and added a ‘jewel’ to her necklace. There you have her, Elizabeth Regina, the first Queen Elizabeth.
