Doors of Perception

 “There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors of perception."
                                                                                               ~ Ray Manzarek of the Doors, 1967

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall. And for private, for everyday use there have always been chemical intoxicants.
                                                                                      Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

Doors of Perception

ingredients: vintage book covers, vintage book page, vintage used envelope, image transfers, acetate, acrylic ink, watercolor pencils, metallic and nonmetallic artist pens, mica, leaf, found objects, milagros, stitching, glass beads, brads, beads, electrical resisters, vintage key




If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. 
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
                                                                  ~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790




reference: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/17/rock-doors-between/

Stuck in the Middle Again...

I have been steadily working whenever I get a chance.  In the past, there were far too many times when I'd get 'stuck' while working on a piece - just couldn't figure out what to do next to save my life.  I would waste time fighting with it, trying this or that idea, and hating them all.  A good solution, I thought, would be to work on more than one piece at a time, so that I could let one rest while I attended to another, thus lessening the frustration as well as giving it time to percolate in the back of my mind. This also keeps me from wasting time, which is at a premium. I'm sure many of you do this, and it's generally a very good strategy.

However, I have now reached this impasse with 2 pieces at once.  Story of My Life, which I showed you at an earlier stage of unfinished-ness, has come a little further, but then ground to a halt again.

The other one I'm currently working on is this, with the working title Doors of Perception:

The problem with mixed media is that you may not have exactly the right 'thingamajig' or 'whatchamacallit' you need in order to complete the piece to your satisfaction. One thing that helps when doing this type of work is to have a wide variety of materials available. The more stuff you have to choose from, the greater the odds that you'll have the perfect object or material in your studio.  Unless you have so much that you can't find anything, which is a whole other sack of potatoes. The other drawback is that you may be regarded as a hoarder.  My kids are not shy about telling me this; other people are probably thinking it, but are too polite to say so.


So, in the meantime, what do I do? Start on another?  Make pesto?