Soon after arriving in Hawaii,
Gloria Foss took a collage class from Les d'Alexandre, a noted artist. She learned
how to dye ordinary white tissue papers so that they were multicolored and patterned. No
two papers were ever identical, and that has proved to be the endlessly fascinating thing
about the dye process.
After d’Alexandre returned to
his home in Europe, Gloria began to teach semiannual paper dyeing and collage workshops in
a six-day intensive format. She taught her own technique of gluing down random
shapes of gold or silver foil on the canvas first and overlaying them with the hand-dyed
tissues. When glued with an acrylic medium, the tissues become semi-transparent,
allowing the foils to reflect through them.
When Gloria Foss retired from
active teaching to finish her first book, How to Paint, the paper dyeing and
collage workshops continued, thanks to her longtime colleague, Susan Rogers-Aregger. They have collaborated on a new book about their
collage methods entitled Paper Dyeing
for Collage and Crafts. It will be
available in the summer of 2004. The entire cover of this 8.5” x 11”
horizontal book is a reproduction of a collage mural Gloria Foss was commissioned to do
for a building in Waikiki. “…Let
There Be Light. Gen. 1: 3" is a perfect
example of her method of layering hand-dyed tissues over foils. The front half of the mural is shown on the cover
of the new book.
