Mary Mother of All

"Mary, Mother of All", is an acrylic paint and digital print collage on canvas, 22"x 28". Finished recently. Shown here are the full painting and two detail images.

Mary is my muse. The concept evolved over time. I harvested the iconic Mary image from the web. Created a large photoshop file. I took the smaller images from digital files that I have created over a period of years. Some of the images came from my paintings that I had photographed and reworked digitally. Some of the images came from my personal life photographs that I had worked on in photoshop. Other images I got from Bing web images and repainted digitally.

There are about thirty small images. All were imported to the large file. They were arranged, color adjusted, and fit into the large Mary image. Then the large image was broken into segments that fit the 9"x 11" format of my Epson printer and printed out. The segments were cut into pieces to fit into the final picture. A canvas was prepared with paint and gel mediums. I wanted to indicate a summer sky. Self leveling gel was applied to the canvas to give a slight actual depth between the ground and the collage elements. The segments were fixed to the canvas with gel medium. Gel medium finishes topped off everything. The "sky" is glossy and the central image is matte finished.

Next I photographed the canvas. The photograph was not very good so I again reworked it in photoshop to create a the focused digital file that you see here.