The Artist's Eye and Looking through your own personal microscope

I turned the pages of Nana's Book slowly, so as not to crumble the edges or remove them from their seating in the spine, fragile as it was. I learned how valuable it was to work slowly as I turned and discovered this page -- a girl's picture -- carefully glued down onto the page of lines and lines of typing. The young lady who was doing the gluing must have wielded a heavy hand on this page, for it seemed she left a bit more glue in one spot than she should have, and perhaps it had not completely dried by the time she closed the book for the day. By the time I turned the page, a spot in the hair of the young woman pictured had scraped or pulled away, revealing the word "may".


Oh, my! I immediately named this photo "May", and I gingerly scanned her right away.
The next time I came across her on my computer, I decided to make her three faces in one. I began playing with reversing the image, as well as varying transparency of each image. What resulted was "Three Faces May".



The last time I called upon May to be my subject I combined her face with the enigmatic "May" with some details from an old leather-bound copy of "LITTLE WOMEN", my favorite book. As I played with the text and the outside cover, and as I pasted some of the text from the book into the art piece, I was reminded of the words Alcott chose to describe the March girls' Christmas breakfast. She described the oranges and the coffee so delectably that I could, and can, almost smell and taste them. I vowed I'd write like that some day! I'm still trying. Here is "Pretty Little Woman May".



Now when I am looking over any ephemera I have collected, I put it under my best personal microscope: my own eyes and imagination. You would be amazed at what I see.

Lynda