Tree Bernstein
words & pictures
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How to be Melancholy
Melancholy
The
Book Club
The Melancholy Book Club meets monthly at a sad café on the other side of town where nobody goes.
Samuel Pepys will be there, naturally, with his diary. Madame Ginoux and St. Mark can be depended upon to discuss the latest book club novel with great ardor. At the same time, Rossetti's lover will be rather bored, yet slightly entertained by a slender volume of tragic poems confident that her pet Kingfisher will keep an eye out for spies. Naturally, it is a melancholy affair—and always well attended.
The Portal
SOMETIMES I DREAM MYSELF INTO THE PICTURE, which then becomes a dream come true when the collage is complete. The monochromatic blue characters in some of these dreamscape collages came from a discarded history book about despot generals. I realized later that the blue illustrations were actually blueprints of an old unattributed painting. Turns out, cyanotypes were lurking about every-where just waiting for me to notice.
Lucid Dreamers
Bucolic Disasters
Animals are the messengers who
tell the stories in this series of Bucolic Disasters. The background images are photographs of rural Northern Colorado.
Into that wide-open photo space, the collage is imposed as a surrealistic fable or perhaps a line from an old familiar song.