Buried Treasure Blog Event...Surrender Dorothy

'Surrender Dorothy' mixed media collage painting by Kim Smith 2013 (please do not take image without permission)

I am reposting this for the Buried Treasure Blog Event today. I have gone thru all of my posts and still come back to this one as my all time favorite. Going back thru my blog from the beginning was filled with nostalgia, many memories of swaps and workshops, and several 'oh my god, what was I thinking?' I picked my top 5 fav posts and even though it is fairly recent, I kept coming back to this one and remembered how much I enjoyed making the art and the post. Please visit Seth Apter's AlteredPage blog to see the list of participating blogs!

3/14/13....The inspiration for this painting is a black and white photo of Judy Garland as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. I LOVE  this image and knew it was the one I would alter. This is a 5x7 mixed media collage on matboard. I used a paint over technique on Dorothy's image using pens, acrylic paints and stamps. In the background are the TinMan, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow, her companions on her journey on the Yellow Brick Road. I wanted to create a piece that gave a sense of Dorothy having gone thru an apocalyptic event (the tornado) and her transition into the surreal place that is Oz. At the same time I wanted to preserve her aura of innocence and purity. She's tired, pale, hungry and a little worse for wear but still maintains her vision of home and family. I named this piece 'Surrender Dorothy', not because she has given in to those that try to distract her from her goal, but because she has surrendered and accepted her decision to journey into the unknown only to find in the end that everything that she was seeking was already within her. xo