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.