There was a period of time in my art life that I worked almost exclusively in collage. In the early stages it was partly because I couldn’t afford a lot of art materials, and partly because I was having trouble with acrylic on canvas, which is what everyone else was using. Of course that isn’t what I told people. I told them I was doing the ecologically decent thing, and recycling.
The early collages were built entirely of bits of paper and pours of diluted acrylic paint, ink and whatever other medium came to hand. I would stick the bits of paper–newspaper, flyers, phonebook–onto a sheet of polyvinyl, and when the painting was dry, I peeled it away, creating a work that was one piece without a backing. Some of these works were very large–8′ x 12′. The problem was how to display them. As time went by I used canvas as a backing, allowing me to stretch the work on a stretcher.
Magic Carpet is approximately 3′ x 3.5′ and has a canvas backing. Funny how I like it so much better now than I did when I created it.
I hope you like it too.
Eve Barbeau 