This is what I see as I sit at my desk. I put up this collage a few weeks ago while I was getting an article ready. The blank, greyish brown wall was too empty and too dark, and I needed some kind of stimulation as I wrote down my ideas.
I came up with this, first by putting the mustard yellow wrapping paper as a background.
This is not the full collage. I have had to crop it to get the images as clear as possible. I have several other design drawings, a large card of a Tiffany window from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the middle window here), my drawing of a mourning dove, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Les Grands Boulevards, which I saw at The National Gallery of Canada's Renoir Landscapes exhibition in Ottawa in 2007, amongst others.
I thought too many images would be a distraction - blank wall/paper and all that. But, it is actually helpful, and it is a comfort zone where I can calm down and think, with all these familiar, and beautiful, things around.
Here are the images:
1. Swan design from Well-Patterned.
2. Iris gift wrap paper from Longwood Gardens gift shop.
3. Cards from a photograph I took of the Cloisters, in New York.
4. Program from the exhibition Guilded New York at the Museum of the City of New York, showing Cornelia Ward Hall and Her Children. I visited the exhibition last year.
5. A print of my photograph of ferns, from my "plants from the Allan Gardens Conservatory" series.
6. Oak leaf from St. Peter and St. Paul Cemetery, near Philadelphia.
7. Balloons for 4th of July near Wall Street in New York. I took this photograph over ten years ago. I did a google image search "wall street balloons for fourth of july" with or without quotes, and mine is the first that comes up.
8. Patience at the New York Public Library, New York. I couldn't find a postcard of her companion Fortitude. I've used the library on a couple of occasions. I have a library card, which I got as a non-resident.
9. The Palm Court in the Plaza Hotel. Again, this is a postcard, although I have taken several photographs of that beautiful interior.
10. Card from the Frick Collection's Precision and Splendor exhibition. I bought the card when I visited the exhibition, which is a detail of the 18th century Gilt-Bronze and Enamel Mantel Regulator Clock.
11. Woman at Table with Parrot and Lamp at the exhibition A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America in the American Folk Art Museum, in New York.
12. A postcard, framed, of a photograph of hydrangeas I bought at a sidewalk display at the Central Park mall. The photographer, Diane Dua, has a website.
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat