Making Art From Maps

Jill Berry’s new book, Making Art From Maps: Inspiration, Techniques, and an International Gallery of Artists, is now available.  The book includes project ideas, and advice on material and techniques shared by the artists featured in the book.  The book showcases the work of a number of artists, myself included, who work with maps.  

Ask for a copy at your local, independent bookstore, or order it online. 

Mark Garrett

As an artist who has spent many years working with old maps, I always take notice when I find other artists who do the same.  It’s natural to be curious and see what others do with maps.  I am especially interested when another artist has found ways to use maps that I have not seen before.  And, when the work itself is good, or in Mark’s case, exceptionally good.  I always appreciate labor intensive and detailed work with maps – as opposed to the sort of people who just cut up a few squares and call it art.   Mark manages to cut up maps and use the pieces as if they were strokes of paint, and in some cases even adding some actual paint to his work.

And now that I have talked up Mark’s map work, I have to tell you that you won’t be seeing it in Collage meets Landscape.  He had a successful show earlier this year and also shows regularly in open studio events.  For this show, we are exhibiting work from a series where Mark takes old postage stamps and incorporates them into mixed media paintings.  Mark will be one of two artists who will show work that incorporates postage stamps.  The other artist is Molly Rausch.  Their work complements each other nicely.  Each artist starts with stamps and goes in a different and unique direction.

More of Mark’s work can be seen on his website.

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The Collage + Landscape = Collagescape will be on view at San Francisco’s Glama-Rama Salon and Gallery at 304 Valencia Street in San Francisco.

The show runs from July 29 to September 28, 2014 with an opening reception on Friday, August 1 (7pm to 10 pm).

The exhibit will have two components:

On the main level, there will be an exhibit of my new series of work called Collagescapes.

On the upper level of Glama-Rama, I am curating a companion show of mixed media works, where the theme will be Collage meets Landscapes.

Blue and Purple

Wherever you go, there you are, mixed media on canvas, 11”x14”

For all the map pieces I have done, I realized this is the first bigger piece where the dominant colors were blues and purples.  It was a break from my current series to return back to the world of maps and map quilts.  This piece was commissioned for a private collection.

The Italian Job

Italian Scrapbook (Album dei ricordi), mixed media on canvas, 11”x14”

A new piece that is like an encore to the travel series I did for the 2012 installation Imagining Val Travel.  An all Italian-themed travel pieces that includes: stamps, maps, vintage postcards, old photos, opera ticket stubs, a pasta package and some items more than 50 years old from a scrapbook I use as source material.  This piece was commissioned for a private collection.

A little bit of hoarding — a lot of art

As individuals, there are the things we save for some reason or other.  My list of collectibles includes national park brochures.  The ones they hand out as you drive up to the gates and pay or show your parks pass.  Map, graphics, black bar with white lettering – any national park visitor knows what I mean.  I have a stack dating back 20 years.  And when I am planning a trip, I go through them and see which ones I need to take along.  But of course I always pick up fresh copies and have been known to grab an extra one or two at the visitor center as well.

I was drawn to park brochures long before I started repurposing them for art.  Aesthetically they are good examples of graphic design, informative and, well of course, they have maps.  I have always wondered why the Parks Service has never consolidated them into one book.  This is the national parks guide I want.

Below is a piece made from national park brochures.

Map and Guide, mixed media on canvas, 24”x24, 2012

The original is still available as well as prints, cards, laptop and iPhone cases, etc. from Society 6.

This is why I experiment

Prototype – Black and White City, mixed media on canvas, 8”x8”, 2006

I am always a big advocate of experimenting in my art.  When I do come up with a successful idea, I want to work on it through a number of pieces and keep refining the idea. As I am working on one idea, it always takes some self-discipline not to get distracted by the new ideas percolating in my head. And then there are times when I don’t even notice I am working on a major experiment until I see the results of the finished piece.  This week I was reminded of one my favorite experiments.

For the first decade of the 21^st Century map-based collages dominated my work.  There was a great deal of experimentation with pattern, types of maps and color palettes.  I usually work small first.  Because my work is so labor intensive, I do not want to spend weeks working on an experimental piece I might consider a failure.  Back in December 2006, I did this 8”x8 prototype piece seen above.  This was a pattern I had been working with for a few years, but that time I decided to do a black and white version.  I used only street maps of different cities found in the backs of atlases from the 1940’s and 1950’s.  All of the maps were interspersed in the index section of the atlases.  There were also black and white photos of various cities on those pages.  What I had not realized is that by using those maps, I was sourcing the same ink that was used to print the photographs.  The color of the maps was not just black and white but had the distinct tone of black and white photography.  It was a delightful surprise and reaffirmed why I keep experimenting.  In the following months I did larger pieces with the same material.  I was reminded of this prototype piece this week when my gallery let me know they had sold one of the larger pieces.

When Creating Art is an Act of Historic Preservation

Over the years, while working on collages, I began to see how using source material from a certain period could “date” a piece. I do not mean to imply that by “dating” a piece it’s somehow out of fashion. But rather I am using the term “dating” in the sense of freezing time. When I use older source material in a contemporary piece, I am creating something akin to a time capsule. So much of the material I use is destined for landfills and recycling bins. When I repurpose the material for a work of art, it in turn also becomes preserved in a way other than the placing it in a drawer or mylar envelope.

A collage can be a way to preserve various ephemera. Even after a little cutting, you are setting the material in some sort of glue for the ages. But when I start cutting, there is usually little of that kind of preservation going on. I tend to work with small pieces — thousands of small pieces. But even after I cut material into little pieces and reconfigure it, what I still do preserve is the color. And color can really change over time. Some shades of a color are very distinct to a certain time.

For example, when you see a distinct shade of a color it can trigger a memory. The color may bring an image to mind or specific point in time. It happens when you see a color like the original blue on a classic car and immediately realize that particular blue was only used on cars during the 1960’s. Memory triggering color may also be associated with clothing, household objects, old photos or printed material. It might be the shade of baby blue or pink that reminds you of a vintage telephone. There are distinctive shades of red and blue that were used as backdrops in advertising photos in the 1950’s. The olive green and harvest gold kitchen appliances of the 1970’s are unmistakable. Dig deep in the closet and something in a very bright yellow or purple (or both) might fall out. It’s probably a shirt that hasn’t seen the light of day since Daddy Bush was president.

As I cut up things like old maps, atlases, vintage postcards and discarded magazines and books my first purpose is just to make a work of art. I work in the present. But, I also understand that I am preserving color palettes that are disappearing.

Some examples of some Palette Preservation can be seen above and much more is at tofuart.com.

Elephant Magazine, Issue #7

Issue #7 of the British art publication Elephant Magazine is out. Two of my map pieces are featured in an article about artists working with maps.