Fi Webster's photos

Cut-paper collage 8 1/2" x 11" Credits, starting at the back & coming forward: Grey patterned fabric (1953) by Lucienne Day. Black & white frame (1952) from fabrics by Maharam. Sofa fabric (mid-1930s) and sofa itself (at some later date) by Josef Frank for Svenska Tenn. The two leaping dryptosaurs were painted (1897: see sig in lower right corner) by Charles R. Knight after meeting with the famed paleontologist E. D. Cope. (Knight was only 23! Did you know that images of dinosaurs this convincing were being made in the 19th century? I sure didn't.) As for their behavior, I don't have any young dinos running around my house, but I do have a pair of 9-month-old oriental shorthair kittens: the positions of those dinos are exactly the way my young carnivores look when they're engaged in play fighting and foreplay. Drawing of Dinoland from a brochure for the 1964 World's Fair. Knight died in 1953, so he didn't get to see his dream come true, but he made all the clay models that would eventually be cast in hollow resin for the popular exhibit. His partner was passionate about the project and carried it to fruition. Charles R. Knight was by far the most influential dinosaur artist of the 20th century. I won't list all the animators and movies inspired by his designs: just look at all of them that have dinos in motion (like the original "King Kong"). And the "mid-century" white lighting fixtures by are by Le Klint. (You may know of the later "bubble lamps" by George Nelson.) What does mid-century modern design (MCM) have to do with dinosaurs? The timing! The time on this planet when people (adults, even) were most obsessed with dinosaurs was not, as many think, when the movie "Jurassic Park" came out. It was the 1950s through the mid-1960s. And also if you look closely at those lamps and compare them to the ridge on the back of the upper dryptosaur's neck, there may have been some visual borrowing as well. If you'd like to know more about MCM, I recommend Mid-Century Modern Complete by Dominic Bradbury. If you'd like to know more about Knight, I recommend Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time by Richard Milner.

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme: "Black & White." Two credits are due: the swirly stuff in the lower right corner is from a photograph by Rebecca Resinski (the same photographer whose water images I used in "fur people day at the water exhibit"), and the detail that goes from lower left to upper right is from a painting by Gordon Onslow Ford. This was inspired by something my Qigong instructor said: "We are all beings of light.."

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme: "Black & White." This collage needs a story. I'm afraid I'm no good at making up stories. All I can tell you is the messenger is the focus, and that's asemic writing on the sign he's holding.

Cut-paper collage 9" x 9" "Due cani" means "two dogs" in Italian. The silhouettes of the chihuahua (left) and Great Dane (right) were lifted from a single photograph that ran in National Geographic . The maps that make up the two dogs and their background are both from roughly the same area in central Italy. I don't know what country the border map came from.

Cut-paper collage 8" x 10 1/2" The foreground layer contains art that is cartographic but abstract: it does not correspond to anything in the real world. There's a reproduction, in puzzle pieces, of a drawing with felt-tip marker—brown & red on cream paper—by a mysterious outsider artist known only as "Michael." Also in that layer are some details—black & white squares—from an acrylic painting by Guillermo Kuitca. The background layer was an experiment. I printed a bunch of maps of all different types (roads, cities, topo, geologic, hand-drawn, & so on), about 25 in all, on clear sticky paper and layered them on top of each other. I figured it would turn out dark and muddy.... and so it did. =laugh=

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme: "Blobs."

...Fire 'Zilla will emerge from the depths of the sea. But will he come to rescue us, or to escort us to our well-deserved doom? Fire 'Zilla from photo by Patti Sundstrom. Views of the ocean's surface from photo by Richard Ellis.

Cut-paper collage postcard created for Kollage Kit theme:"Babies!" Pantagruel (pahn-TAH-groo-ELL) is a baby giant—son of Gargantua, also a giant—in the tales of François Rabelais. The postcard image of crying babies is from a weird little book, Babylon: Surreal Babies. (Check out the cover image.) These baby postcards, says editor James Birch, "had a great influence on many artists in the 1920s and 30s, and were collected by Paul Éluard, Andre Bréton, Salvador Dali, Hannah Höch, Herbert Bayer, and Man Ray."

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme:"Yuletide festivities." Greenery background drawn by yours truly with markers. All the rest is from Christmas catalogs. Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! Have a cool Yule! It's almost Sunreturn, when the days start getting longer...

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme: "Drive-In Movies." The giant lizard is a Gila monster, native to the American Southwest. On the screen are Lon Chaney, Jr., and Elyse Knox in The Mummy's Tomb , 1942.

Cut-paper collage created for Kollage Kit theme: "Museums and Galleries." This one's an experiment—my first 11" x 17" (28 x 43 cm) collage on fiberboard. The water pictures are details from photos by Rebecca Resinski. The background behind them is actual wood—thin-sliced cherry. The Asian sun bear is a drawing by Amelia Bauer. The galloping horse is from a painting by Charles Knight. That's a real human being whose face is peeking up over the edge: it's a painted portrait of a man with hirsutism (aka lycanthropy). Except for the fuzzy white dog on the right, all the fur people are undomesticated. It seemed weird to me that the vampire bat is purple, but then just today I saw a photo of another species of black bat, hanging in clusters in a cave, and they looked purple, too.

Cut-paper collage created for swap-bot Creative Collage swap "CC: A Bit of Pink." The fish is an oblique-lined dottyback. (I liked its name so much I used it for the title.) The grey cone in the background is a photo of a sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The handwritten piece below the fish is from a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Cut-paper collage postcard, with acrylic paint on background, created for Kollage Kit theme: "Shopping Spree."

Cut-paper collage art with acrylic paint, markers, & colored pencil.

The story behind this cut-paper collage postcard is that the other species of mushrooms were envious of Psilocybe getting to have all the fun of being the psychedelic mushroom, so they decided to have a big San-Francisco-in-1967 party and wear all their best psychedelic duds. The morels weren't invited, but they crashed the party anyway. All the psychedelic art is from posters for Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium, circa 1967.

Cut-paper collage w/ acrylic paint 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" That's a famous photo of icthyologists posing in the reconstructed jaws of the giant prehistoric shark, Megalodon. I don't know when the photo was taken, but as you can tell from the clothes, a long time ago. The title was inspired by the fact that those reconstructed jaws no longer exist. They were found to be inaccurately large: we now think the maw of Megalodon was more like four feet. Time eats everything, eventually.

Taken by Bob Knox at our farmhouse in rural south-central Pennsylvania. The flies that collected on the upper pane of the window were a novel experience for this 7-month-old kitten.

My 7-month-old oriental shorthairs are getting more & more mischievous. They're the reason why the shelf in front of the window is a randomized tangle of whatever. As for Oscar biting Nénu's tail, it happens so often she doesn't pay attention anymore. =laugh=