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The Great Millers Telling the story of my great grandparents through collage

After finding a bunch of old family photos while moving, I felt drawn to try to create a project with them. After discussing the project with my mother, I decided to focus in on my maternal great grandparents because they had such an enormous impact on our entire family. As children, my mother and her two sisters stayed with my great grandparents every summer. I grew up hearing about the antics of my great grandparents and how they were beloved by all the neighborhood children. Likewise, when I was little, my great grandmother helped to care for me and my cousins while our parents worked. She had a huge impact on my character and my outlook on life. Grandma Great and Grandpa Great, as they were known to my generation of grandkids, were never too old to get on the floor or too busy to spend time playing with us. As Grandpa Great was known to say, "If you think you love your kids, just wait 'til you have grandkids."

Inspiration

Research

I began my research by going through the photos and recipes that I found at my house. I reached out and asked my aunt to gather photos and memorabilia that I could use for the project. I also asked my mother to write stories of my great grandparents from her childhood. My aunt arrived with several large binders of family genealogy and envelopes of old photos. In with the photos were many hand-written journal pages from my great grandmother. Lastly, my mother-in-law supplied ephemera from her collection of vintage magazines from the 1960s.

I checked out many books from the local library to research collage techniques. The three books that most helped my process were: Stitch Alchemy by Kelli Perkins, Collage Quilter by Emily Taylor, and Mixed-Media Self-Portraits by Cate Coulacos Prato. Each book had unique suggestions for working with materials, especially fabric, which I initially thought I would include in my artwork.

Family Stories

I learned many things about my great grandparents from this project. The following are a few of the stories I have incorporated in the collages. It seems like Grandma and Grandpa Great would do just about anything to entertain their grandkids and the neighborhood kids. Grandpa would hook up an old-fashioned sleigh to his car and drive the girls around town in the sleigh when it snowed. He turned the alley into a giant slip-n-slide. They would turn their clothesline into a huge tent for all the neighborhood kids, who also called them Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa was known to take my mom and her sisters out into the plowed cornfields and let them drive his car around, despite being too small to see over the dashboard. Grandpa Great loved candy and he always carried bubble gum for any kid who asked. He also fed his poodle, Dinky, extra strong peppermints and Dr. Pepper. He let me draw all over my new leather baby shoes with an ink pen because he thought it was funny and he always shared his french fries with me. It seems like Grandpa Great was known for fun. He and my grandmother met when he went to purchase alcohol during prohibition from my great-great grandfather, who was a bootlegger. When questioned by the police, he explained that he was actually there to see Mr. Fifer's daughter. They started dating and visiting the dance hall at Edgewater Park in Celina, Ohio, known to draw famous jazz musicians traveling between between Chicago and New York.

"One night... he walked me to the door, put his hands under my arms and swung me up in the air and around a circle and I guess that's when I fell in love with him."

They married in 1929. With three pregnancies in their first three years of marriage, my grandma became increasing ill. After losing her daughter Alice at only 3 months old, my grandma's health quickly went downhill resulting in a hysterectomy in her early 20s. She was sent to a women's ward in the state hospital. She credited her recovery to becoming born again and accepting Jesus Christ as her savior. She was very religious for the rest of her life—being a devout Christian was one of her defining characteristics. Despite living through those hard times, she was still the best grandma, great grandma, and great-great grandma. To be funny, she would walk around on her knees pretending to be Tiny Grandma or she would let us stay up until midnight to bang pots and pans at her retirement village on New Year's Eve. She made the best meatballs which she always called "piggies" and let us drink warm "Jell-o Juice" on cold mornings. She was stubborn and a night-owl, traits that she has passed on through many generations. She was known to stay up and paint or clean in the middle of the night, always climbing up on a step-stool, and often falling off of it too.

Concept

I began with a snapshot of my great grandparents, but later changed to a professional photo that my aunt supplied. I wanted to recreate the photo by collaging elements of our family history together. I began by prepping a large piece of canvas—gluing tissue paper to the surface to create "paper-cloth" using the method of Kelli Perkins. I then sketched the outlines of the photo onto the surface of the paper-cloth. Then the fun began—arranging and adhering the family photos and memorabilia to the artwork, trying to create my grandparents out of the pieces. The first challenge was that there were so many more photos of Grandpa Great than there were of Grandma Great. I had so much to work with for him that I covered his suit jacket in photos. For my Grandma, however, I did have all of her writing, so I used that for her dress. I wanted to leave most of their faces un-collaged to let the paper show through as negative space, so I used the tiniest pieces of text for details in their faces and made their glasses out of war rations stamps. At that point, the photos on his jacket were too vivid and distracted from the overall work, so I used acrylic paint to add some shadows and to dull down his coat. Then I hit a creative block. I knew I wanted to layer in hand-written stories, a vintage Ohio map, and some imagery from the stories into the background, but I didn't know how to do it and still keep the project analogue. I had wanted the project to be done entirely by hand, to have a physical artwork at the end, and to challenge myself by not working digitally. I had to let go of that constraint. I moved the project to the digital realm and was able to layer in all the pieces and adjust the opacities so they wouldn't distract from the artwork as a whole.

In addition to the large collage of my great grandparents, I wanted to do something special with the stories written by my mom. I took each of the stories and combined them with photos of my mom, her sisters, and my great grandparents from the appropriate time period and then added in drawings and ephemera related to the stories.

Process

Final Projects

The Great Millers
Left: Grandpa's Sleigh; Middle: Grandma's Camp; Right: Grandpa's Slip-n-Slide.

Bibliography

Brommer, Gerald F. Collage Techniques: a Guide for Artists and Illustrators. New York, NY: Watson-Guptill, 2007.

Hale, Julie, and Terry Taylor. Masters - Collage: Major Works by Leading Artists. New York, NY: Lark Crafts, 2010.

Krysa, Danielle, and Anthony Zinonos. Collage: Contemporary Artists Hunt and Gather, Cut and Paste, Mash up and Transform. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 2014.

Perkins, Kelli. Stitch Alchemy: Combining Fabric and Paper for Mixed-Media Art. Cincinnati, OH: F+W Media, 2013.

Perrella, Lynne. Al.pha.bet.i.ca: an A-Z Creativity Guide for Collage and Book Artists. Gloucester, MA: Quarry Books, 2005.

Prato, Cate Coulacos. Mixed-Media Self-Portraits: Inspiration & Techniques. Loveland, CO: Interweave Press, 2008.

Taylor, Brandon. Collage: the Making of Modern Art. London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Taylor, Emily. Collage Quilter: Essentials for Success with Collage Quilts. Sandy, UT: Emily Taylor, 2019.

Personal family history originally compiled by Robert L. Miller.

Created By
Kim Rader
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