Never Give Up: The Hidden Story in My Lemon Sky Collage

©Pamela Hirsch, Lemon Sky, Paper, Acrylic, 10×10 inches

At the crevice of Ever Never land, there stands a bridge. It takes the wanderer from uncertainty to hope. The black moon rises in a yellow sky while mist envelopes the horizon. And yet, below, two sides once fractured come slowly together in their realization of sameness and a common need for rest and peace.

Lemon Sky is a collage made with paper I've "painted" myself. I typically use a Gelli plate and acrylic paint to create unique papers, often layering them with multiple prints from the plate.

Some of the paper is made using designs I create in Canva and then print onto transparent tea bag paper with my inkjet printer. The writing you see in Lemon Sky was done that way — it's a line from a Winston Churchill speech about never giving up, repeated over and over again.

This was not his famous “Never Surrender” speech, but was, instead, one he addressed to the students at Harrow in 1941. “…never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.“

I also used found objects to ink up and print on tissue paper. That bridge shape, for instance, was created using rubber packing material. You never know what you're going to get.

Before starting Lemon Sky, I chose papers based on the palette I wanted to work with — greens and yellows, plus some taupes and black for contrast. And then I just started tearing and gluing.

I knew I wanted to make an abstract landscape using a T-composition. One piece goes down — I think I started with that dark green paper in the lower left — and went from there.

I often don't have a clear intention about what a collage piece will be about when I start. Seeing what emerges is always a delight. And a mystery. The Churchill sentiments are certainly important to me these days, but I think there are other things at play as well — things that are probably still unconscious. Like why a dark moon shape in a yellow sky?