After that I chose three collages to paint on large pieces of unstretched canvas.

So what started out as rhododendron-inspired collaging ended up in a test case if I could use my collages as a source code for larger paintings in which I could upheld the depth. It proved harder than I thought because of two things:

1. Collages have a felt sense of depth in themselves because of all the actual layers – something you can’t reproduce, unless you would use multiple layers of paint on top of each other (which I didn’t do because of the amounts of paint I would have to use on the already large canvasses + the amount of time I would have to wait until one layer was dry enough to paint over and I had exactly two weeks for this experiments because of reasons I would really like to forget so forgive me for not disclosing xd).

2. Scaling the collage composition from A4 to 80x120cm was not something I could do without meticulous planning. So I had to divide the canvas in squares, trace the collage on see-through paper and draw every collage-square onto the canvas-squares. That sort of felt like squeezing all the feeling out of it and making it one large mathematical equation. And although I do love math it’s not necessarily something I would like to incorporate in my artistic practice. Let alone all the tape I had to use in order to protect all my carefully painted small pieces of several colours in the background.

So was Layers of Spring a success? Yes and no. Yes, because I liked the results on canvas – although I felt they needed to be even bigger. And yes, because it showed me a completely different approach to using my collages as starting point for my paintings.

No, because I got very frustrated during the process. All the tape and measuring and ruling got me fed up with the works before they were finished – and not fed up in a good way if you know what I mean. It didn’t feel like an invitation of the artwork to keep working on it and try again but rather as an urge to throw them in the garbage. And also no, because within the collage there is so much more texture going on (because of the way I draw patterns on my source paper) which is not there on the oil painting. But in a way you could classify this realization as a yes, because I learnt something more about what makes my collages work.