3SIXTY5 #11: Garden Dreaming

Please accept my apologies for the awful image. The original is too big for my scanner, so I did what I could with the hand held digital camera. My son is going to help me set up a copy stand with a tripod (of which I have several, from the old days of taking portfolio shots with the 35mm camera) so I can avoid bulgy, distorted pictures like the this. Later I will replace this image with a better one.

I call this collage Garden Dreaming, because that's about all I'll be doing garden-wise this year! What's cool is that all the flowers in the piece (and even the swallowtail butterfly) were cut from photos I took of my own garden over the years. The view through the gothic window is the actual view through my bathroom window. I added the gothic window frame, which, alas, my bathroom does not have. The Botticelli angels have yet to appear in my garden, but I keep hoping.

Tonight I attended a performance of Pittsburgh Ballet Theater's Swan Lake, and got to see my ballet assemblage box with the other works in the exhibit. It's amazing the spectrum of ideas and interpretations that the artists came up with for transforming pointe shoes into works of art.

A Swan Lake for Joseph Cornell

My Facebook friends wanted to see a photo of the assemblage box I made for this weekend's Pittsburgh Ballet Theater fund raiser, but for some reason it wouldn't upload on FB. Here it is:

This photo was taken before the piece was put behind glass, thus there is no top on it yet. It measures approx. 13 x 16 x 5 inches. PBT provided each artist with a pair toe-shoes from which to creat their art, preferably with a Swan Lake theme. It was cool just to see real pointe shoes up close! The shoe in the lower portion of the box represents the Odile, the Black Swan. I wish I had taken detail shots of that area because you can't see anything in this photo. There are black feathers sprouting out of the shoe. The walls are lined with gold music on black paper.On one side is a tiny photo of an x-ray of a ballerina's foot on pointe, and on the opposite side is a picture of a swan skeleton (you can just see a bit of it, by the heel of the shoe.)

The upper part of the box is lined with music from the score of Swan Lake, and represents Odette, the White Swan as pictured by Tamara Toumanova. The "wings" are wire, gauze and white feathers. The small blue bit is a tiny photo of Joseph Cornell's box, "A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova: Homage to the Romantic Ballet," which he made in 1946. Thus I entitled my box to be a homage to Cornell himself.