Mixed Media - Collage
Sometimes the craziness of everyday life leaves me feeling like I’ve been torn up into little pieces and the bits have been tossed to the wind—scattered. Working with mixed media is a way to bring all of those bits and pieces together and make some sense of the chaos. All of the images below are created from bits of paper, no paint involved.
Working in layers with these bits and pieces it is easy to see how the many layers of paper echo the layers in the world around. For instance, in a landscape I see overlapping layers of colors, shapes and patterns. Each hilltop, shoreline and forest edge is another layer. Since I am interpreting everyday landscapes, why not incorporate bits of everyday things, found close to home, that add meaning to the landscape? So in my collages you will find bits of handmade paper made from shredded legal documents, bills, and junk mail, and dryer lint, as well as tea bags, labels, rubbings of fossils and other textures, gravestone rubbings, origami paper, hair, seeds, milkweed silks, Christmas tinsel…the list could be endless. Landscapes that are made of all of these scattered fragments and putting them together into a form that can be recognized is piecing together some kind of order out of the chaos. Isn’t that what we are all trying to do?
Working in layers with these bits and pieces it is easy to see how the many layers of paper echo the layers in the world around. For instance, in a landscape I see overlapping layers of colors, shapes and patterns. Each hilltop, shoreline and forest edge is another layer. Since I am interpreting everyday landscapes, why not incorporate bits of everyday things, found close to home, that add meaning to the landscape? So in my collages you will find bits of handmade paper made from shredded legal documents, bills, and junk mail, and dryer lint, as well as tea bags, labels, rubbings of fossils and other textures, gravestone rubbings, origami paper, hair, seeds, milkweed silks, Christmas tinsel…the list could be endless. Landscapes that are made of all of these scattered fragments and putting them together into a form that can be recognized is piecing together some kind of order out of the chaos. Isn’t that what we are all trying to do?
Dusk at Benezette
Paper Collage
18 x 30
Paper Collage
18 x 30
©2014 Merriam L Ryding, Under Covers. All Paper Collage, 12 x 16 inches.
Did You Happen to See the Moon Last Night?
9x12 Collage (sold) 
Moon Over East Branch
10x8 Collage (sold) |
Rebecca Ann at Hector's Falls
18x24 Mixed Media 
Gram's Lighthouse
Collage 16x20 Private Collection |
"Noticed"
All Paper Collage
All Paper Collage
