Victorian Photocollage

There’s a show on right now at The Met in New York City called The Art of Victorian Photocollage I’d love to see. Apparently upper class Victorian women during the 1860s and 1870s were experimenting with collage by combining photos and watercolors like the two examples shown here. What is fascinating about this is that avant-garde artists like Braque and Kurt Schwitters who are considered to be the originators of collage—and the Surrealists—hadn’t even been born yet.
Obviously these women were well in advance of their time and it makes me wonder what those of us experimenting away in Photoshop will end up inspiring sixty years on down the line. Of course by then all art may be taking place inside our heads. But in the meantime, I thought I’d pretend to be an aristocratic Victorian photocollage artist—with a little help from Photoshop. (Wouldn’t those women have loved using it!)

The Pattern of Her Thought

I haven’t been keeping up with my blog for a while now and there are a lot of reasons why not—reasons I know most of you could relate to. Instead of cataloguing them though, I thought I’d mention the post on Copyblogger that convinced me I needed to get back on the horse again. Well, not that I fell off exactly. I’d describe it more like taking a long voyage into the interior and staying much longer than I probably needed to.
Anyway, according to the writer on Copyblogger, the five warning signs you might be a “Blograstinator” include: (1) You keep postponing (2) You push so hard it hurts (3) You are easily distracted (4) You’re constantly generating ideas (5) You’re a chatter, not a writer.
There didn’t seem to be a category for I’m-too-busy-watching-TV-and-reading-at-the-same-time, but I could see from the list it was obvious I was postponing things—and the longer I kept putting things off, the easier it was to continue doing this. So enough is enough. I’ve done a spring-cleaning mentally and decided I have to get with the program and start blogging regularly again. Wish me luck.