Planes, Trains, Watertaxis and Bones (collages 5+6)

I'm not really happy with this piece as a whole. It ended up being more closely related to the gouache painting I did and less to the collages. Something about it feels off to me. Maybe the composition doesn't really work. I DONT KNOW! The idea was to create an image about traveling around from Venice to Florence to Rome. I wanted it to be fun and have floating angel heads. ARG!!!!

So even though that was kind of a disaster I kept on....


While in Rome I wanted to visit the Capuchin Crypt. I've seen gorgeous photos in National Geographic of much larger bone churches. I was convinced that it might be one of the coolest things I would get to see while in Italy. It ended up being a little different than I expected.
On the up side it was very cheap (pay what you want) and it was short! So unlike the Mutter Museum, I didn't feel too squeamish. Not to rag on the Mutter Museum either. The whole thing made me wonder who's job it was to meticulously arrange the bones and clean them. At some point I decided to pay homage to this large amount of work by taking it upon myself to cut all of the skulls out individually for my collage. Why I thought this was important became less clear to me about 3 days into cutting out skulls smaller than my thumbnail.

Voila! Almost a direct representation of a postcard I picked up from the gift store but.. hey whatcha gonna do when you aren't allowed to take your own photo reference? I'm pretty happy with how the collaged elements in this one seem to add to the three dimensionality of the skulls.