Collage on burlap

My mom has a really interesting piece by a chinese artist whose name I forget now. It hangs right over my bed when I visit her in Vienna so I often looked at it and studied it. It is an ink drawing and painting on a paper collage on canvas. And because of the paper collaged to the canvas, the artist could use ink in very much the same way as he would have on regular paper. But it's also a painting. OK, I know this probably doesn't explain the piece well, but the point is that I always wanted to try a collage on fabric as well. And recently I did.

Instead of canvas I used burlp because I like the coarse texture. To make things simple, I decided to do the collage just with acrylic emulsion (not with rice paste that was probably used on the other piece). Also I wanted to build up a picture just through collage and the texture of the fabric. The first of these is pretty small. Here I also tried several kinds of colored gesso in the background (including transparent gesso - I wanted to see how it changes the look of the burlap - result: you see a bit of a sheen on the gessoed burlap, the overall appearance gets a bit lighter and - of course - some of the fibers are glued together which somewhat changes the fuzzy texture of the burlap. Maybe by spraying the gesso on the burlap this could be avoided? But it's not a big issue)



I must say I quite liked the result so I made another one. This one has no gesso, but just various kinds of paper collaged on the burlap.