#ArtIHeart 14 - Here's One I Made Myself

Art I Heart

Share the art you love from your walls, a birthday card, what your child drew at school, that you saw in The National Gallery in London...

1. Choose one piece of art that has a short personal story behind it. It could be something on your wall, something you've seen in a gallery and love, homedrawn, on a postcard, on a birthday card, something by Degas or something by your DS.

2. Take a photograph, scan or download a picture of your picture and post it along with the short story about why you are drawn to it, have it on your wall, bought it, or hate it. Don't forget to link back to the linky so your readers can see the other entries.

3. Link up (it's open till next Thursday, 4pm GMT), leave a comment, et voila!

Here's mine:

This is sort of a continuation of Art I Heart 13 in which I wrote about the Carlos Spaventa postcards from 30 years ago. He didn't reply to my email so he's not getting another link to his website (even though I still love his photos).

I wrote that I went through a phase of collecting art postcards. As with most collections, you get to a stage when you have an impressively sizeable collection and you think, now what? What was I to do with all those postcards?

About 24 years ago I worked at an American summer camp and when it was over I went travelling with some of the other staff. In Los Angeles I visited someone's house and she showed me some really interesting artwork done by her grandmother. There were about ten collages made by cutting details from magazines and sticking them together to make whole scenes. There were villages and cities, farms, railway stations, and beaches. And they were good. Very professionally done. A bit like Linda Nelson Stocks (who I discovered later while travelling in New England) except that my friend's gandmother hadn't done any of the drawing or painting herself.

I loved those collages and remembered them much later when I was deciding what to do with my collection of art postcards. What you see above is my effort. The parts are mostly from French paintings but I can't remember exactly what came from what. Maybe you'll recognise some of the details. And here it is on my kitchen wall, next to last week's Art I Heart.