Marjorie Pesek Fine Art

I had a busy week last week and a very gratifying one! Last Monday I had an all day open house with Martha Richter who creates fine handcrafted jewelry and is a long time family friend, at at a beautiful home in Naples. We had a good, enthusiastic crowd visit us that day. It was a lot of holiday fun. See Martha's website: www.martharichterltd.com

I then held a 2 day workshop at the Art League of Bonita Springs Tuesday and Wednesday. I always love these workshops! We all got to know each other and, because they are also artists with their own style, we all shared our own unique artwork with each other. The women who attended where so enthusiastic about learning my technique. At times they got a bit frustrated once they discovered the patience that is required to complete a Layered Imagery (Paper Mosaic) piece. But I was determined that they leave there proud of their piece they where creating. I think I succeeded because we were all smiles and hugs at the end of the class. I congratulate them for their hard work and good spirit. It is alway hard to end a class because we feel like it has just begun. It never seems like enough time. We all wanted to stay all day but it is easy to forget, while engrossed in the creative process, that we all had a busy schedule for the rest of the day.

Ordering a MPFA print

Then select a mat (by the way all these options are listed on the left side). The outer mat is "mat 1" and the best selection is "white/cream" then select the inner mat "add a mat" and choose "rococo cream".

I selected this combination in mat and frame because of the traditional look but there are many other options that may have a more modern look. The mat should not be any bigger then the frame because because the proportion will look odd. I selected the mat with this frame because the inner lining matches well with the beads around the frame.

The "glazing" option is a bit confusing. It really means what kind of glass do you want. So I think you should select "uv protection acrylic" so the art will never fade from sunlight or artificial lighting.

Then go to "check out" and you will have your framed golden retriever print mailed to you.

If you want it delivered by Christmas, please oder by Dec 14 for ground delivery or Dec 17 for a 2 day delivery.

I have many other images available so please take the same steps for ordering a different print as I just explained with the golden retriever.

Ordering a MPFA print

The next step is to choose a size and I recommend the medium size. Then choose a paper and the best would be "ultrasmooth fine art". Then select a frame and I think the best choice for this piece is the "distressed black with gold bead".

Ordering a MPFA print

I would like to show you how to order a framed print from my my website www.marjoriepesek.com. I am recommending a favorite piece of mine and the steps to how order the print framed. The first step is select this image of the golden retriever. Then select the second "custom" button.

Marjorie Pesek Fine Art

This is very exciting that my artwork is one of the featured artists today on the Imagekind home page! This site has thousands of artists who are members so I am thrilled they select me out of so many especially at Christmas time!

Marjorie Pesek Fine Art

I am so excited about this piece! I was so worried that the "collage" of the floating images would look messy. But here we go--they look great! The balloon and hand on the actual cover of the magazine will be a bit tilted to the left by the art director for a visual effect so I need to adjust the cloud line to tilt in that direction and some of the floating images behind the balloon should also shift a bit. I plan to get the final art to Futures tomorrow. I hope you like it as much as I do. As an illustrator I need to portray a story and I believe this is telling one.

Marjorie Pesek Fine Art

I have been hired by Futures Magazine, an international financial trade magazine, to create a cover about the 2010 economic outlook and the interest rate being held down at zero percent. This is the third cover I have created for them and it is always a great creative process.

The first photo is a bit hard to see but it is the final sketch of many for the concept of the cover art. The first idea was to have Bernanke holding down a balloon but this, with the big hand, was decided to be the better choice. Keep in mind that I need to allow room for the "Futures" heading on top. The next 2 photos I am slowly developing the concept. The blue stripe across the ballon is going to be a banner with the headline for this issue.

The final piece will have a bunch of international currencies and other symbols representing our economy blowing around and being sucked into the bottom of the balloon.

At this stage it looks a bit weird but it will all come together in the end and make a lot more sense.

I'll keep you updated in the next two days on the last few steps to completing this piece and next month, when this issue is published, I will show you how the cover actually looks at the newsstands!

Marjorie Pesek Fine Art

Please look at my new website: www.marjoriepesek.com

I am so proud to have you view my new website! I am lucky to have found Bryan Burch who is so incredibly talented to create a website that shows my artwork in its best light. He has a design company called www.digitaldesinghouse.com. Go to his website to see all he does such as his videos and photography. An artist himself!

I also want to let you know how lucky I have been to find a business partner, Patrice Shields, who helped Bryan know exactly what we needed and wanted and she selected all the text and images and ideas for each page which she gave to Bryan who, given this information, developed the look and made it a really easy to navigate and very visually intriguing website!

I am grateful to them both!

Please take a look and I would love to hear your comments.

Paper Mosaic

I always start a piece by carefully researching what I want to create. For most of my career I would go to the library and check out books on a the subject and I would also stand in bookstores leafing through magazines for picture of the same subject and buy the ones that were helpful. I, of course, would always end up cutting up the entire magazine to use for the color and texture. If I did not have enough blue for the sky or for the water I would hunt through more magazines. As you can imagine this took hours and hours and that is before I start to clue.

Now in the last few years with the internet images and ideas are easier to find then searching through the library and bookstores.

Once I find a picture I like, I the sketch quite a detailed sketch onto canvas. I have files and files of images and colors that I have torn out of magazines over the years so that's where I go next. I lay out what I find all around me and start the process piece by piece. Every line, every dot is paper, none of it is paint. I do not even own a tube of paint.

Paper Mosaic

I would now like to share with you my process and how I discovered it. I was an art student in college trying so desperately to understand oil painting with great frustration because I like to act on an idea right away, not wait until the paint dries. So every piece turned to mud.

I saw this nice collage another student made out of wallpaper and was inspired to try this also. So in my dorm room I sketched out an image of my parents and I realized I did not have a way to find wallpaper. But I did have a stack of glamour magazines and decided to use that paper instead for the color and texture. As I said in my last blog, I discovered my medium and found I could actually make a portrait!

After this portrait of my parent was seen by their friends, they commissioned me to do a portrait of them. And it went on from there.

Although my technique started out a bit chunky and abstract it soon became more refined and detailed. I think my work is a bit different then most would call "collage" because that would imply something more abstract and it would be like cutting out an eyeball from a magazine cover and gluing that onto the portrait I am working on for the eye. But I don't do that . Instead, I cut out tiny pieces of colors of greens and browns and blend them to create a hazel eye in the shape of that particular person's eyeball. I cut out little pieces of black to create the eyelashes. I use color and texture to make every detail like a painter would use paint.

Paper Mosaic

I would like to share with you how my artwork has evolved over the years of creating my Layered Imagery artwork. 20 years ago I started using the term "paper mosaic" to describe what I do because I actually was using paper instead of tile to create a traditional mosaic that we are all familiar with. Now it seems to be a common term, which it was not at the time, to describe paper collages. My guess is because scrapbooking has become extremely popular and so many more people love paper . I love paper, anything paper!

I have experimented with many mediums as a child and in college and I never could achieve creating what I wanted such as a portrait (which, by the way, is the hardest subject to ever try to paint). But when I started experimenting with paper I got it right away and on the first piece I tried--a portrait of my parents. Wow I could not believe it looked like them. I knew then I found my medium. And I have been doing this technique ever since. Of course my work has improved as you can see comparing my first blog photo of the horse to this photo of my parents in this blog--the very first piece I every created 20 years ago using my techinque.

Welcome to my first blog...

Hi, My name is Marjorie Pesek and I am a Layered Imagery Artist. welcome to my first blog. I am new to this whole blogging thing, so bear with me if I make any first time blogging mistakes.

I thought I would tell you about what I do for my first post. Layered Imagery is my name for the technique I developed and have been practicing for over 20 years, in which I hand assemble hundreds of photographic images into a single detailed work of art. Each piece takes several intensive weeks to create. It is a passionate process for me of making sense out of chaos.
I call my work Layered Imagery because it describes both the emotional experience of the viewer as well as my physical process of creating each piece by cutting, pasting and overlapping the images. I am trying to capture layers of life: to tell a story of the various experiences of the subject, create a mood, and reflect a moment.
It describes the viewer discovering that this is not a painting but are layers of photographs made into one full portrait and of him/her joyfully finding those special photos within that celebrate the subject. It is also the emotion that comes from those I create portraits for of their loved family members or pet with the memorable images of that subject woven within.
Layered Imagery is to see beyond what is on the surface. It is to look deeper and not just see a tree and see only the leaves and the branches but to see faces, flowers, bees, balloons or pens. There are millions of possible pictures that we can create with our minds. Like when you look at the clouds and see sailboats, animals or angles.

Thank you for checking out my first post and you can learn more about me at www.marjoriepesekfineart.com