Tangled Up in Blue

First published 11-13-11 in my original blog, Postcards from the Heartland. 

"Tangled Up in Blue" 24"x24" on hardboard, collage

This is one of those paintings that just didn't work out at first, but turned out to be one of my favorites. I started it when I was still taking classes at LLCC (grad. 2006).  Basically, it was just different blocks of blue acrylic paint with some texture added. Blah! 

On my sad, last day of school I was carrying it out to my car and a fellow student, who knew I didn't like it, said, "Hey, I'll take that if you don't want it." But I decided to keep it and use it as a base for a collage.

It's a heavy piece, 24" square on birch plywood. The horizontal and vertical strips are cut from woven-plastic shelf-liner. The small squares on top of the strips are 1-inch squares of watercolor paper painted different shades of blue.  There's a sort of ruffled valance across the top: the elastic band from a pair of my husband's boxers --- with a butterfly perched on it in the upper right corner. The brown rock shapes were torn from a slick Jeep brochure. There's some bits of Japanese rice paper, a very special (to me, anyway) chopstick embedded in a pile of strings (which was something that unraveled in my clothes dryer???), and four corn dog sticks, which I use as paint stirrers. Can you find the little dragon on the bottom right corner? It's a raveling pulled from a favorite pair of old blue jeans.