Wedding Portrait of Madam Himmelblau, oil on panel, 2005 by Carrie Ann Baade. Click image to view source. This painting is from the Secret Lives of Portraits series.
via Right Some Good.
The Hi Fructose blog is featuring an exclusing interview with contemporary pop baroque painter Carrie Ann Baade. Reading Baade's description of her working process, I found that she uses collage as a sketching method, just like I do! Quote:
The spark of the muse that could be called intuition is present when I make the collage for my work. I begin this process by covering the first floor of my house in photos and ripped out pages from books. After the floor is covered I walk around looking for images that fell on top of each other in an interesting manner…this is similar to reading tealeaves. Often I will have a question in mind while diving into the piles of picture images, such as, “What can I say about the horrors of dating in Tallahassee.” This process reminds me of reading tarot cards and getting an answer through the cards that can sometimes be uncannily accurate. Looking for the divine spark to speak to me through these images, I collect and adhere together with cellophane tape to paint later. I know something is really working if I involuntarily laugh aloud at the juxtaposition.
I feel the same intuitive connectivity when I'm making collage sketches. Sometimes the best compositions happen by accident, because I left two scraps in the same pile. I look over and realize, with a little rush of adrenaline, "Of course those go together!"
Ostrich, collage sketch, 2007 by Sarah Atlee. Click image to view source.
I like how Baade allows the collage aesthetic to show through in her finished paintings, without her images appearing slapped-together. She does an excellent job of creating integrated compostitions from a variety of sources. The world is a vast grab-bag of information, and our job as artists is to interpret, reinterpret, and dis-cover meaning through our medium. Although Baade has been told that "paint was an inadequate media to display the complexity of [her] ideas," her intricate creations overflow with narrative and emotion. You can explore more of Carrie Ann Baade's work here.
As I was reading this interview on the Hi Fructose blog, I felt an eerie similarity between Baade's collage process and my own. This feeling was redoubled when I saw the previous blog post about the release of Isabel Samaras' new monograph by Chronicle books. The gent on the cover bears an uncanny resemblance to this guy here. The similarity is a coincidence.
This post is part of NaBloPoMo for July 2009.