This morning I had intentions of finishing the insides of a completed collage cover to be called Cloister. As I took a last look at the front, I thought it needed one more gold strip so I tried it in a couple of places using logical rules of composition. There’s not a lot of conscious talk going on at this phase — it’s just whatever “art/instinct/create/process” is.
Before I decided, I happened to see a spare picture of Empress Josephine from a previous cover next to the one I was working on. Hmmmm…what a difference it made to the Cloister story if I included the portrait of an intriguing secular woman – an artistic “aha” moment.
I found a likely candidate in my Raphael book, innocent and young but definitely up to something. I liked her in black and white, but it was too jarring, so I aged her with a bit of walnut ink and applied her to a small raised panel and attached he between the two main figures.
The result? A new and stronger story – I love the art/collage process. It can “tell” you exactly what’s needed, sometimes by design and sometimes by the muse throwing in a happy accident. And it’s all done in a fraction of the time it takes to try and explain it.
There’s always more than one right answer in creating artwork, but this one worked for me.