Originals

MINER'S APPARITION original paper collage


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Size & Details

Size & Details

Original paper collage features a gray wolf standing in the western slopes of Colorado with aspen trees and an old miner cabin in background. This large-scale contemporary wolf art merges hand-cut paper collage with painting.

  • Medium: vintage papers on wood with acrylic painting
  • Size: 44.5" H x 76.5" W (framed)
  • Frame: hand-assembled weathered brown-grey wood frame with Museum Plexi
  • Hardware: ready to hang with D-ring hangers
Story

Story

This was my ritual, my religion, and I felt as if I was chasing this silent oracle of the mountains.- Dolan Geiman

I didn’t notice her at first, a sleepwalking apparition-grey against the melting spring snow. I had gone down for water and on the trail back up as I stumbled through the aspen groves and up into the meadow there she was, suddenly, calmly surveying. She stared at me, then turned and loped back into the aspens, back into the half light of morning. I blinked and the cold morning air hit my neck and I wondered if I had really seen her.

And then it happened again, a few mornings later.

And so we met this way, mornings, as I came down from the claim at daybreak to fetch water. This was my ritual, my religion, and I felt as if I was chasing this silent oracle of the mountains.

I never told the other boys back at camp about her. They’d shoot her first thing and I never wanted that. After all, we had moved into her neighborhood without introduction and stayed, clawing at the ground, turning over the earth to make a living up here on top of the mountain. And then just as suddenly the vein dried up and we had to shut it down, and on the last morning before we tore down camp and had to move out, I went down to see her, to see if she would be there to say goodbye like some romantic, cinematic moment playing in my mind. She was absent of course, and I realized as I stood staring at the cold corner of the open field, the bone white aspens waxing deathlike in the fallow grass, that perhaps I was just another apostle searching for answers in the wilderness.

Process

Process

The background was hand-painted with acrylic on wood panel. Thereafter, I did a rough sketch of the wolf's silhouette which was then constructed from hand-cut vintage papers. Each and every piece of paper, even the smallest detail in the mine, was cut with scissors. Click about the collage process.

process

Learn More

Dolan Geiman Paper Collages

Dolan's signature paper collage artwork celebrates America's West and Southwest. Color, composition, and detail come to life in hand-cut vintage materials, many salvaged in Dolan's cross-country travels.

Creating the original collage starts with a wood panel. Dolan pulls vintage sheet music from his vast collection and applies these to the wood, first with glue, then with a top layer of whitewash paint. In many prints, this background layer of sheet music peeks through.

Next, Dolan draws the outline for the original collage in graphite atop the sheet music.

Dolan returns to his extensive trove of collected papers – think magazines, antique textbooks, handwritten letters salvaged from abandoned farmsteads - and begins pulling the ideal colors for the piece. He cuts each piece of material by hand and carefully layers into the artwork. These collages are carefully crafted from thousands of small papers: no two are exactly alike.

Dolan's paper collages are finished in a handmade frame constructed from salvaged metal or a modern, minimal wood or metal frame.