Medium: Recycled Paper and Vintage Fabric Landscape Collage
Size: 16×16
Year: 2026
Description:
Between the back of my studio and my neighbor Mike’s dock, begins a swamp, the subject of my latest landscape collage titled “Swamp Song Serenade.”
Swamps get a bad rap. They’re murky and dark, and often seen as a graveyard of dead, though, defiant, still-standing trees. But even on a rainy day, I see, feel, and smell the swamp’s beauty.
In the middle ground of the landscape collage lies the ecotone, or pre-swamp, the area before the main swamp. Here multiple stands of cheery, wild Yellow Flag iris set the stage of my opus of multiple octaves.
Past the bright iris, Mike’s dock, represented in the collage with old, gray sheet music, serves as a lyrical overture to the main swamp beyond.
We can’t see the wide wetland water. But we know it hides under the thick, fog-softened-green bushes and trees of the background. In this dense overgrowth, the swamp teems with wildlife – birds, turtles, fish, and muskrat.
Like the modal frame or pitch range in music, trunks of an oak and maple tree In the “Swamp Song” foreground, made out of woven recycled paper, define the outer boundaries of the composition’s melody. A Rusty-colored Virginia Creeper vine, left over from the fall, waltzes down the face of the oak. While leafy dark-green vines play an intermezzo across the lower canvas from tree to towering tree.
The scene is set. And then, the rain, a cleansing shower of slanted silver, plays a glissando across the collage board. And even though the sky is gray, a lighthearted, blue-flowered vintage drawer liner paper I used for the water, defies this rainy day in the swamp offering a positive or Pluviophile – one who likes the rain and rainy days – perspective.