A world of discovery is open to us through books and imagination.  Open a book and grow your mind.

Grow Your Mind

Paper Collage, Envelope Art: Turquoise blue horizontal business envelope. Black and white paper life insurance junk mail creates horizon, Small red "V" shape atop. Blue as sky. White as ground. Red as Butterfly. A bright, simple statement.

Hello Butterfly

A portrait of a young woman pulling on her hair and thus tearing herself apart, surrounded by fingerprints against a gray background. 

unrecognizable

Fused dichroic glass dancing figures mounted on corrugated heat treated copper.

All That Jazz

Stained glass mosaic portrait of a blue jay bird with a rectangular geometric lime green pattern background.

Blue Jay

Color of Water: Under the Sea has vibrant colors and shapes resembling the idea of a coral reef; stitching and beads enhance the movement of the brush strokes and shapes.

Color of Water: Under the Sea

A collage portrait of a person with green hair and comically large facial features; blue eyes extending larger than the hair and head, and a mouth wearing red lipstick taking up roughly half of the face. The portrait is surrounded by a wreath of arms sprouting in all directions and the background is a multitude of bright and busy colors and patterns including stripes, stars, clouds, polka dots, flowers, and random shapes.

Multi-colored tree top with a chartreuse leg/trunk angled toward the lower left on a blue background

Tree Pose

A collage of Donald Trump's head on a winged warrior. 

Delusion

An assemblage of a formal ornate gold frame juxtaposed with a central object of small interlocking plastic pieces forming a bright yellow figure, green 3-dimensional mohawk hair, green eyes, red mouth, white hands, brown and black 3-dimensional shoes on a formal gray background. Figure faces outward with arms outstretched.

Self-Portrait (Little Guy with Green Mohawk...) gold frame series

Paper quilling of a multi-colored hummingbird, orange, burgundy, greens, and black, hovering over a yellow petaled flower and bud with green stems, framed in black with fine burgundy line centered in the black. 

Hummingbird Greets the Yellow Flower

Woman’s image under convex glass dreaming her universe into being. Comet set with moonstone and other celestial objects made from found objects fill night sky made of black and gold porcelain tea cup and saucer. 

Dreamer

A black and white photograph of Medusa and her statues inside her castle. Gold and silver foil accents. 

Medusa

Isle of Holy Name Lake. Intercostal view from my studio. color symbols of fall color, grasses, sky, water

Lake Series #7

A collage of newspaper rectangles and a copper plate layered under a photograph of a sunset on off white paper 

Fire(place)

A collage of a fist clenching dark "revolutionary" female swooping into a gold acrylic swirl of paint.

Revolutionary

Early spring inspired weaving. Neutral tones with a few highlights of yellow and red representing blooming trees. Some leaves and tree branches woven into the piece.

Homeschool 1

Abstract painting consisting of metal and paint.

Rolex

An encaustic painting of a desert background with a photo of a zebra printed on tissue paper and embedded into the encaustic wax medium. Sienna pigmented wax dots were added in vertical columns and horizontal rows to add texture to the piece and highlight the zebra. 

Serengeti Stroll

Green, yellow, and blue sculpture of bubble wrap sheet

Bubble

I approach the collage as a painting not a mere assembly of pictures.  As I collect materials, they seem to connect individually or in groups. I begin to see the materials interact as I arrange colors and shapes, and discovering the form and the space created between them. Each added element will build on the previous one by changing, adding, or even result in eliminating the other components which many times were the original motivating pieces. You must allow the work to evolve and transform until the work seems to emerge from the complex contradictions or similitude, and multiplicity of the forms, edges, textures, shapes, space and even unrelated content. 

They Grew Against the Quivering Light

A 2.5D paper artwork of a white dahlia with pink highlights, made out of 3/8" high on-edge paper strips.

DAHLIA

A drawn and cutout skull of a mouse with utensils in hand (fork and knife) atop a Polaroid photo taken in the forest of Michigan with a piece of paper underneath that reads : I woke up today. 

Awake and Hungry 

The mixed media canvas illustrates the sheer joy.  possibilities and high hopes for a first born son whose life was cut very short as a very young man.

First Born c. 1953

An abstract encaustic work with an added Terra Cotta tile that echoes the colors and shapes in the encaustic.

Desert Lake

A collage on handmade beige thick paper including various papers with handstitched title and the word "stitch" on small rectangles in pink, rose, white, rust brown, plus vintage newsprint hexagons of various typefaces & cartoon images, with random looping thread adding dimensionality.

Mend

Birch Tree with colorful, fall leaves made from craft beer cans. Some leaves are tumbling to the rocky ground.

Brewing Up Autumn

A drawing of a blue girls head covered in icy blue flowers.

Flowers of blindness 

An abstract painting - two pieces of a dismembered shank bone, wired into a wooden panel, one of which has inserted into it a feather.  The panel carries sgraffiti, of which can be read "BEASTS."  It is painted in black, a bit of bright red and blue teal, the colored pencil scribbles are white, lime green and forest green

Beasts, Bone and Feather

A book of flash verse on art & nature: vintage cigar box container for a loose leaf book. The cover is a photo of an unusual white mushroom amidst the prairie meadow plants collaged with a fall colored leaf, all on handmade paper. The book's inside has 19 pages of images printed on handmade paper, with flash poems written for each image, that were created about each piece in the 1-3 minutes the piece was presented to the group at the "Clay in the Landscape" workshop. 

Grow Your Mind, 2020

Janine Olmscheid