Season Collage - Winter Reflections

I'm posting this early. I know it needs more work but I need to step back from it for a day or so. The assignment was to make a collage using a triad color scheme that reflects a season. I decided to try to capture the mood of the winter season of the year and the winter season of life. The man in the picture is my 87 year old dad who is suffering from dementia. He was put in hospice care this month and is now at that time in his life where he looks back more than looks forward. Unfortunately, his memories are fading and he feels isolated from the world and his own life. So that is what I was trying to express in this collage.

The first color choice was easy because blue is the color of cold and winter. Since elderly lose their visual acuity, I wanted all the colors to be muted. So for the triad scheme, I picked a very faded yellow-orange and a faded purple. These are not the colors I would have picked had it not been stated in the assignment. But after working with them, I think they do work.

In the top panel, I put a picture of my dad filtered through photoshop. I left him isolated from the rest of the scene to reflect his feelings of isolation. In the lower panel are photos of some of his memories, all distorted, faded, and blowing away. I left his high school picture more clear because that is the time in his life he remembers most clearly. There is text floating in and out of the photos. I intentionally made the text faded and hard to read to represent the difficulty dementia patients have accessing their memories.

I will continue to work on this one. And will appreciate any comments - good or bad - from our class.
Thanks for reading and viewing,
Ann