THE BOG KEEPER AND HER DAUGHTER

CLICK ON ANY IMAGE TO ENLARGE

This is the second post about work I had in the October show at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts titled GRIM(M). You can read the previous post to learn more about the show.

This piece, THE BOG KEEPER AND HER DAUGHTER, is a favorite of mine. I am very fond of vintage photographs and am always looking for clean ... crisp ... copyright free images that I can use in my art. I was so excited to find the photographs of Costica Acsinte who had a photography studio in the early 1900's in Slobozia. His images are hauntingly beautiful ... and high contrast. Some look as though the chemicals weren't mixed exactly right because the borders of the photos are deteriorating away ... on others, the whole face is evaporating. I am so grateful that someone felt it was necessary to save these images in a digital form.


This is the original image I used for THE BOG KEEPER AND HER DAUGHTER. I think both of these women are exceedingly beautiful and if they were alive today, I hope they would approve of how I used them in my art.


This is a photo of butterburs that grow just beyond my french doors. These butterburs, one of my favorite plants, were the perfect background to blend in with the 2 women. I also blended in some photos of horsetail rushes that I photographed in our local ditches. Between the butterburs and the horsetails, I felt like the feeling of 'bog' was complete.


My whole idea around this piece was that the elderly, wise bog woman was passing on her knowledge to her daughter. Some of that knowledge was held in small amulets and talismans that hung freely from a copper rod attached to the bottom of the cradleboard.








These amulets and talismans were fun to make ... I found a snake skin in my woodpile ... the broken tip of an old fishing rod ... a vertebrae ... lichen in a small bottle ... a bell ... some beads ... etc.

I used the same technique as I did in my last post, tiling archival printed thin gampi paper using pva glue and then coating the whole piece with a cold wax to seal it.

Overall THE BOG KEEPER AND HER DAUGHTER measures 18" x 22" x 1.5.