A Second Cup?

I didn't quite get to to point of manipulating my new coffee paintings this week. I decided I needed to do some more to build up a stash of paintings to use in my collages. I feel I am only now getting the feel of working with the coffee, as it really does have a nature all its own.

I thought you would nevertheless enjoy seeing some of these new little paintings on their own, before they are placed into larger works. I have also purchased some coffee beans to use in the planned collages. When I say, "planned" I mean only that I plan to use these materials. I do not have any particular arrangement in mind as yet.

I painted from some vintage and fine art photos. The photographers I used included Edward S. Curtis and his famous photos of Native Americans, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. I found that Imogen Cunningham is the easiest to "springboard" from, and the paintings I produced based on her photos seemed the most different from their original source. I doubt that one could pick out the original photo from my painting, as it has changed a lot in the process.

Same thing for Edward Weston, but his photo compositions are frequently so austere that one sees only a pose and hardly the personality of the photographer. So the painting seems actually more mine than the photo is his, due to the fact that my own touch at least inevitably has something of my own signature.

The Edward S. Curtis photos came through more as himself. I attribute the sepia tones of the coffee to this , as so many of his photos (all of the ones I have ever seen, in fact) are sepia in tone. The ethnographic details are also a dead giveaway.

A man from Margaret Bourke-White's famous photo of South African miners... Has kind of a WPA feel to it. I think.

And a nude from Miss Cunningham...


Okay, next week, for sure, I start putting these paintings through the collage process.