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An Insight Into My Collage Process

12/1/2014

3 Comments

 
Picture

​I always joke to my other half that I’m at my happiest when I have something to cut and stick.​

My journey into collage began with a crisis. I had been working for a good many years as a jewellery designer-maker - both retailing and wholesaling my designs . I became a victim of my own success with a repetitive strain injury in my right arm. I ignored the tingling, numbing and pain for too long.

Eventually I couldn’t ignore it any longer. It wasn’t going away. I had to make a life change.

A chance encounter in a Manchester bookshop with Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, reignited a buried dream that I’d had since my art school days: To work as fine artist.

The art we hide - even from ourselves

The Artist’s Way led me to start a collage journal. The basis of most of the pages was small, random works on paper that I had made during my years as a maker.

If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had made NO ART over those years. The amount of collage fodder I found told a different story!

This is the work I call “the art we make when we say we’re not making any.” 

You might have some of it too. You’ll find it stuffed in a drawer, in a suitcase under your bed or in a cardboard box on the top shelf of your closet.
​

From pastel to paint

In that journal I first experimented with applying colour over the collaged elements.

I used thick creamy oil pastels which blended the different elements an areas wonderfully.

I still had a real phobia about paint. I felt I had no control over it. It never seem to do what I wanted it to do. 

Mostly what I wanted it to do was behave more like an oil pastel!

It would take me another four years before I embraced acrylic paint as my medium of choice. 

Many-layered collage process

The basis for the layered process I use today was born in 2008 when ​I did a series of seven large paintings based on the story of the Handless Maiden. It goes like this:

1. Apply texture - any or all of the following:
  • PVA glue squeezed from a nozzled bottle
  • acrylic medium - applied with brush or spatula
  • ready-mix plaster - applied with spatula or other appropriate implements
  • wet-strength tissue paper
2. Matt medium to seal the texture and unify the surface
3. Gesso layer
4. Coloured acrylic ground
5. Collage pieces - paper and/or found elements
6. Matt medium to seal the collage - makes it possible to wipe paint off
7. Acrylic paint
8. Final layer of matt or gloss medium to seal

Sometimes I also do some stitching during layers 5 to 7.
​
collage sketchbooks, page and painting
Top left: First collage sketchbooks; bottom left: collage page; right: collaged painting from the Handless Maiden series all ​© Cherry Jeffs

How I cut out my collage elements

​There’s something soothing to me about cutting paper. It takes me back to my childhood when my grandfather gave me a weighty tome that turned out to be a McCalls dress pattern catalogue. To me it looked like hundreds of pages of cut-out paper dolls! As you can imagine, it wasn’t long before I was cutting...

To this day, I still love to wield a pair of scissors. 

Listen to the audio of me talking about my cutting process:

© Author: Cherry Jeffs



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3 Comments
robyn link
13/1/2014 06:30:13 am

Lovely to hear your voice, Cherry. I like the energy in your sketch. Yes, I definately feel more positive about my work after a rest from it. A few months before Christmas I started carving a Book of Secrets and was convinced I would trash it . Eventually I put something over it and forgot about it until yesterday. My creative energy hasn't returned yet but I can feel it brewing and I'm looking forward to working on the book again. Quite a change of emotions since I last looked at it.

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Cherry Jeffs link
15/1/2014 11:13:38 am

Hi Robyn, I've been experiencing some good energy lately so it must be coming through. A Book of Secrets? Sounds totally intriguing! We're certainly not our best critics at times like that are we? Our critical faculty has it's place but time lends it much-needed perspective :) - See more at: http://art.cherryjeffs.com/1/post/2014/01/an-insight-into-my-collage-process.html?#sthash.QKYa2GTb.dpuf

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ukbestessays review link
16/3/2017 03:45:06 am

It's good to know that there still people just like you who are open to be criticize for the good and development of the project. I myself seek the help of other people because if I rely on my own perspective, I tend to become biased with my work. I see that you really enjoy your craft and being able to work with awesome people while doing what you really want to do is priceless. May you have many projects to come and use it to inspire a lot of young and talented artists just like you.

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