Judith Tannenbaum

Been reading and loving Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell. Simic's prose poems inspired these collages.

I've written -- stories, poems, novels, memoir, essays -- close to my whole life. I've made collage for about twenty years. But this summer I took a drawing fundamentals class that allowed me to be a complete beginner again.

I loved the class and the drawing. For anyone in the Bay Area wanting an excellent visual art teacher, I strongly recommend Pam Lanza at UC Extension. We worked almost entirely in charcoal and on increasingly complex exercises that demanded we practice range of value, postitive/negative space, volume, perspective, composition. Here are three of my beginning beginner attempts!

Sunflowers

Exercise in unusual perspective

Portrait of William Trevor

Four new collage in response to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Made many collage this spring inspired by Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Here are a few.

The biggest gift of weeks at an art colony is endless time to write, to make. At VCCA, this past spring, part of my stay was spent putting together a poetry manuscript. I also made collage using some of the lines in my poems. Here are a few of those: