Artist Profile
C
Patti Edmon
reativity has been woven through my life since childhood. In my preteen years, I did pencil sketches and wrote poetry, which evolved over the years to include essays, narrative nonfiction and fiction. In the mid 1980s, photography became another passion and for several years before my children were born I shot medium-format film and spent many happy hours in the darkroom. Chemicals and pregnancy are not a good match, however, so after my (now teenaged) children were born, I switched to digital photography. In 2006, after being diagnosed with a chronic illness that launched me into early retirement, art became my new career. I have worked in various forms of collage, altered objects such as small tins, books, cigar boxes, puzzle pieces and made books from tissue boxes and other scraps, along with painting and mixed media art. Last summer, I had the idea to create pieces using my history of creative disciplines. I chose several photos, each the starting point for these mixed media pieces. My plan was to use paint, found objects and as many art supplies as possible. The process – which took several months for each piece – began with a heavily textured, painted background on an 8x10 canvas, using colors to accentuate and complement the chosen photo. Finding the rest of the materials was no problem, as I’ve acquired significant stashes of fabric, broken jewelry, buttons, lace trim, scrap wood and sticks, art paper, vintage papers, found metal objects, mica, eyelets, brads, fibers and on one piece, moss that I sprayed with various colors of glitter mist.
Issue 14
Process: background painted using stencils and acrylics, a black and white photograph from the 1980s – tinted with watercolor pencils and layered on an 8x10 canvas with fabric scraps, trim, buttons and flocked wallpaper. M IXED M ED IA AR T