Torn Paper #2

Perhaps I am deluding myself, but I think this one looks like an abstract landscape - all from a couple of torn magazine pages.

First in the series

And this is how the torn paper series began ... torn magazine page with a newspaper base. Is that part of a crossword puzzle peeking through?

Stamped

This is the beginning of another series of torn paper /mixed media collages. Some of the postage stamps I have kept have such interesting themes so I am looking forward to creating more of these collages with stamps. Stamped#1 is definitely for cat lovers, but it has been awahile when it cost only 50 cents to post a letter in Australia.

Torn Paper

Over the last month, I have been busily tearing up bits of  paper. I haven't quite gone crazy - I attended a workshop with Belgium based artist, Jette Clover who encouraged us to indulge in some daily art practice, making small collages. Here are some of the square collages I have made into greeting cards.... 

My stockpile is already diminished as I happily gave many away to thank the committee members of a group at a recent Annual General Meeting and others to accompany other thank you and birthday gifts. Tonight's post shows a few, but I think to maintain the daily practice, I will post one a day for the rest of August at least. 

with Jette Clover, in front of her work for "Stitched Up" exhibition. 

CAKE

Tag Tuesday's theme is CAKE ...  When Valerie, the Tag Tuesday coordinator asked me to choose a theme, I am not really sure what I was thinking... it must have been morning tea time... so I said "cake" . Then of course, when the topic appears to be easy it is difficult to feel inspired, but I was the tag designer  of the week, I really had to come up with something ... 

Tag 1 is a play on the words "The icing on the cake" . I have had some cupcake scrapbook paper which I have had for years, so felt I had to use it for this theme regardless. It made a good background for my black pen drawing of a cake and a skater tentatively balanced on top of the icing... I drew the cake and the skater separately on sketch book paper and then cut them out and glued them to the background. Really a very simple tag created from paper with a felt tipped pen. 

My second tag refers to Marie Antoinette of whom I was reminded as Bastille Day is only a couple of days away. The saying "Let them Eat Cake" is often attributed to her. Historians have now determined that she could not have said that ... "Let them eat cake" is the traditional translation of the French phrase "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche", supposedly spoken by "a great princess" upon learning that the peasants had no bread. Since brioche was a luxury bread enriched with butter and eggs, the quote would reflect the princess's disregard for the peasants, or her poor understanding of their situation.

While it is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of this phrase ever having been said by her. It appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, his autobiography (whose first six books were written in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years of age, and published in 1782). The context of Rousseau's account was his desire to have some bread to accompany some wine he had stolen; however, feeling he was too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recollected the words of a "great princess" ( from Wikipedia)  

I would like to think in her position, she might have said "I'll eat my cake!" I have depicted Marie Antoinette, as a fiery redhead (a pen and watercolour drawing), determined to have her cake and eat it!

. The third is the simplest of all this series of Cake tags.  I covered a cardboard  window template with a page from a recipe book to reveal a woman obviously beating up the mixture almost ready to put in the oven. The image is from a magazine, so this tag is literally a 5 minute wonder!  

Hope you will also visit Tag Tuesday to access the links to the many tag artists who will also be interpreting CAKE over the next fortnight.