Sunday, September 27, 2009

Scatterling© - available for purchase



Scatterlings© is a collection of self-directed enchantment art which combines actual foliage with watercolor and color pencil mediums. Hidden among the actual and rendered foliage are an enchanted assortment of Scatterlings; mythical animals and fairies. These one-of-a-kind folk art pieces take up to a year to complete as flowers and leaves are collected, pressed, preserved and finally hidden within a vision that evolves continually. (Mixed Media; Pressed Foliage, Watercolor, Colored Pencil, Pen and Ink on Handmade Paper.

With the advent of Giclee (zhee-clay) the art of fine art printing has become even more precise. Because no screens are used, the prints have a higher apparent resolution than lithographs. The dynamic color range is greater than serigraphy. In the Giclee process, a fine stream of ink -- more than four million droplets per second -- is sprayed onto archival art paper or canvas. The effect is similar to an air brush technique but much finer.

Choose from: Stretched/Mounted CANVAS Giclee 24"w x 18"h. Ready to hang. Shipping & Handling Included! or Giclee Enhanced Archival PRINT also available in 24"w x 18"h Suitable for framing. Shipping & Handling included!

Some originals are available.

See thumbs, info and price list here!

Jacquelyn L. Berl (also known under the artistic monicker “Ascender“, see more works on her website and blog) is a versatile and prolific artist with a strong drive towards finding an original signature style. She creates art with a seemingly unlimited assortment of media, fusing various schools and trends into a conglomerate body of work. I would categorize her style as gravitating towards the surreal, often with fabulous qualities; it characterizes in various degrees her mixed media works, collages, ink, watercolor and oil paintings. To my mind Berl achieves best results with the more combinative efforts, and while the more traditional artwork exhibits engaging pristine and figurative qualities, it is in the more complex and “dirty” pieces that her creative potential finds a unique outlet.

Viewing the “Scatterlings (c),” which, according to the artist, “combine actual foliage with watercolor and color pencil mediums” is a rich and magical experience — not surprising considering the “mythical animals and fairies” populating these pieces. In a way it replicates the ritual of reading a fairy tale to a child: each night the infant would ask for another reading of the same story and each time the story would sound different. It is possible to see each scatterling as a meta-illustration of a fairy-tale, existing or not. Perhaps even more radically, each piece is indeed a fairy tale, only of a visual kind. This would make sense considering the arduous process, taking up to a year, of making (”writing”) them.

Technically they may be seen as Pollock’s logical continuation: he painted while putting the canvas on the floor, letting gravity participate in the process, and Jaqueline similarly alludes to gravity, which forces the leaves and the plants she uses down to earth. Thus she may be proposing an idealized artistic view of the physical world around us, everyday objects being the media and the ground they rest upon the surface. But even without this allegory, her artwork bears a purely visual resemblance to abstract expressionism, all the while retaining the concrete form of the inserted magical characters (visit her blog for close ups) — the result is a fascinating surreal mishmash.

Clever use of perspective, compositional rhythm and color toning, combined with actual flora creates a bewitching effect of three-dimensionality. I cannot decide whether the artist panders to the younger audience by incorporating real objects, seeking to emulate depth with actual depth on the paper, but it certainly appeals to the child in me, evoking an inner smile. I also think that it is this kind of works of art that more than usual encourages children to want to become artists — it could be the appeal of using objects found in nature, something every playful kid does as a matter of fact anyway.

Elijah at Art & Critique



No comments: