My ATC: The Patriarch

This ATC is called "The Patriarch". This was made in December 2005 for a "found photos' themed swap. The hostess sent me a bunch of antique photographs and we had to use an original photo as part of the ATC.

I thought that the elderly man sitting in the chair looked like the King of the family so I named this artist trading card "The Patriarch". He really seems to be in control of the family. Based on their body language, I am guessing that the woman is his daughter and the other man is her husband.

The background is made from an old Mechanix Illustrated magazine from the 1950s which is advertising jobs for men. I chose that intentionally as it represented men, men's careers and money making opportunities as the family's bread winners. I liked the color of the paper, due to the oxidation and the acid content of the paper. I used Claudine Hellmuth's masking tape technique as outlined in her book "Collage Discovery Workshop", combined with my choice to tear strips of the paper and to randomly glue them to the background card.

The text is rubber stamped. I wanted to be sure that my message that this man was the patriarch of the family was expressed to the viewer and final owner of the ATC.

I thought the ATC needed some other element to decorate it, but had to be careful about my choice. I needed something masculine. I decided to look through some buttons I own, because I thought an object with dimension would be better than another flat paper element. The star is a button which I bought in an inexpensive button assortment pack from the craft store. I cut the back off of it so it would lie more flatly and used Golden Acrylic Gel Medium Regular as the adhesive. I chose the star for three reasons: the color was right for the ATCs color scheme, the color is masculine, and because the star represents power and authority. The man who I call the patriarch is the ‘star of the family’. I thought it was a perfect addition to the ATC.

At that point the edges of the ATC looked bare. So, I finished the ATC by dragging the edges across a black ink stamp pad. Looking back, I now realize I could have also cropped the whole ATC down to a smaller size and mounted it upon a black background, so that the magazine ad background would have looked like a mat around a framed picture.

I like the simple color scheme of the grey tones, the beige colored paper and the black ink.

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