Six Wise Men Went To Jhaampe Town

"Six wise men went to Jhaampe-town
To climb a hill and never come down
Found their flesh and shed their skins
Flew away on stony wings"
- Robin Hobb

I have decided to name the piece "Jhaampe", after the capital city of the Mountain Kingdom in the Realm of the Elderlings novels by Robin Hobb. With Jessie Cammack's suggestion, I realized that this image fit perfectly with the Tibetan associations I'd already made with the life and peoples of the Mountain Kingdom. I found this quote today, and realized how perfectly its imagery suits my own.

Details:

I hope to continue to work with Hobb's books as inspiration.

Final Progress Update (hopefully)

I am extremely, excessively, close to crossing the finish line on this collage. I'm now tossing around the title "The Long Fall". You can see that I've now added a little bit of Niagara Falls to the upper left corner of the sky. I thought that was a nice fantasy flourish.

The biggest triumph was finding an image of weeds growing on a roadside which I wove around the two hikers image so that the background and foreground were integrated into one cohesive image. The colors aren't quite perfect, a bit too bright, but thats where I must admit oil paint has its advantages.

Watershed Moment

I don't think that I've ever had a collage come together so quickly. It hasn't even been a week yet and already I've got only some small areas left that a few inspired images would fill up in hours. My work today was propelled by the purchase of a Conde Nast Traveller (UK) magazine, one of the benefits of Midtown living are those international magazine stores, which featured not one but TWO articles about mountains and Tibet (respectively). I think that last sentence was a tangled, twister of a run-on, mi dispiace. I've entirely abandoned "The Fitz & The Fool" as a working title, but am still looking for suggestions! (Why does no one ever respond to my queries?)

With the Tibetan images having solved my foreground/background dilemma, it looks to be smooth sailing to completion with a few notable exceptions. The most troubling challenge to me is finding a way to integrate the light sky behind the two figures on the lower right with the hills that I've imposed "behind" them. Maybe some image with some kind of roiling fog that can bridge the two images?

My second challenge will be the sky area between the red cliffs and the green. I really don't like doing sky made up of lots of little bits of blue, it always looks bad to me. I have an image of Niagara Falls that I'm contemplating integrating into the blank area above the falling figure. Or some kind of bird/dragon/angel combatant? Too crazy?

Coming Together

I've reached a point where you can start to see the composition developing. I don't always know where the collages are heading, but I think that it's even harder for other people to look at a collage in an early phase and extrapolate to what it may look like complete.

Collage in Progress

So I have kept working on my collage (I'm quite proud to say)

The details emphasis how much like a jigsaw puzzle the process is.

Inspired again

So I've managed to finally break through my artist's block which I'm really thrilled about. I'm working on a 12"x36" collage which so far has a very vertical composition that reminds me of chinese landscape paintings. I like the working title "The Fitz & The Fool", not that the subject matter is particularly reminiscent of the Realm of the Elderlings but I just wanted to dedicate my first piece of art back from my hiatus to the books I've been reading in the meanwhile by Robin Hobb.