Collectors Edition: Chapter 5

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Pulse -- The State of the Art -- a survey in words and pictures of the online artist community. Nearly 150 artists have answered a list of questions which make up The Pulse. Their responses will be presented as a series of online and print projects. Links to the first four projects (Secret Sunday, The Book Guild, StudioScapes, Viewer's Choice) can be found on the sidebar of my blog.

Collectors Edition is the fifth installment in which your favorite artists share their favorite collection or obsession.

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Marion Bockelmann

I collect unmounted stamps, postage stamps showing people´s heads for using them in my artwork, and vintage papers.

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Michele Jackson

I collect earrings. I have over 200 pairs from all over the world. Some women feel naked if they leave the house without make-up. I don't wear make-up, but I feel naked if I leave the house without earrings. I also collect tarot decks (I stopped counting at 400), Devil figurines and statues, skeleton figurines and Day of the Dead sculptures, and Betty Boop figurines, bobbles heads and snow globes.

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Jacquelyn Berl

Golden's iridescent and interference acrylics

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Carole Leslie

You only have to look at my blog or etsy shop to see I am a bit Buddha obsessed. I am drawn to most things with an Asian flavour and style. Here's a painting of mine. The fun thing about it is, it was a palette and had so much wonderful colour and texture that I couldn't throw it away. I painted over it and then with an exacto knife I cut the little nubs of dried paint so that they emerged from the background. I stamped the words "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" which is from a Buddhist text called The Heart Sutra but it also speaks to art work. Then I put a little box frame around it made from some old pieces of trellis wood.

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Jacky Williams

My current obsession is gouache paints.

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Leslie Marsh

Old books. Some I repurpose. Some I just keep to look at and smell.

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JeriAnn Geller

My current fascination has been using holiday windows as a kind of ready-made photo collage.

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Jayne Harnett-Hargrove

I do think it is awfully enlightening to see what we unconsciously collect. The things we imagine we do not have enough of and keep gathering. In my last organizing purge of the studio I put together a pile of dice, a stack obsolete library index cards, and a mound of smashed souvenir pennies.

Consciously, though, I collect things that I can not make. the rusty bent nail, a flattened flour scooper, those old telephone connectors. Even when I cannot imagine (imagine that) not using these time-altered items, the history of the thing pulls me and muses me into the building in texture, words, and crossover from 2D into 3D book form.

As others may find also, the longer one works, obsessions seem to cycle and rebound. Moving from one burner to another. As working with one media gives energy and rise of another, more familiar channel. I do think it has something to do with wanting to exhaust all possibilities. An intuitive relationship with my own workings go from the visual vocabulary to the written word and altered planes. Looming big, for me, is the religion myths as a tool to understand and evaluate the human condition searching for the threads of resonance that connect us all.

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Patti Sandham

Art Journals 

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Paula Bogdan

Including bits and pieces of everyday life into a journal made of leftovers!

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