VICTORIA SMITH
COLLAGE GALLERY
Collage
Collage is such a wonderful medium to use to explore and express not just creativity but feelings, emotions and viewpoints.
Here you will find a short index of the ways in which collage has been used by artists and artistic movements, providing a jumping off point for your own research and collage journey.
Collage created with glue and scissors (or a craft knife) using paper or other two dimensional materials.
All my collages are analogue.
Digital collage is created on a computer either using scans of analogue collages or using computer generated images.
Advantages - Scale and colours can be altered and collages can be animated.
Digital Collage
Analogue Collage
The Cubist Collage
Often sited as the first use of collage in arts works, collage within Cubism was used by its founders, Braque and Picasso initially to allow the viewer to have a fuller experience of a subject matter. All the possible views of subject were reproduced and in spreading them across a plane all sides of the subject could be viewed simultaneously.
The artists went on to further dissect, rearrange and reconstruct each view of the subject resulting in more of an idea of the subject rather than an image of the subject itself. In time, real objects were also added to the paint such newspapers, wallpapers and oil cloths.
Some sixty years before Picasso and the Surrealists Victorian women were already experimenting with photo collage, creating fantastical witty combinations of animals, humans and inanimate objects, placing them in imaginary landscapes and worlds.
Artists to explore - Picasso, Braque
The Dada Collage
After WW1 young artists, many suffering the devastating effects of war wanted to create sort of anti-art that stood against the contemporaneous academic art and the supposedly perfect society it represented. The term Dada was originally intended to mean nothing and yet say everything. It sort, through the use of collage, to physically take apart and destroy images, using scissors as their weapons. Their speciality was the photomontage. The cutting and rearranging of photos to create a new image the was as absurd as it was true.
Artists to explore - John J Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Suzanne Duchamp
The Surrealist Collage
Surrealist art is the art of the subconscious, from the world of dreams and fantasy. “Beautiful … as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” Comte de Lautreamont.
Artists to explore - Sarah Eisenlohr, Rocio Montoya, Eugenia Loli, Max Ernst
The Pop Art Collage
Pop Art is a celebration of popular culture and aims to combine high culture and mass culture. It took the language of American mass media, the cinema, magazine, advertising, comic and TV and used its motifs to expose the world of consumerism, media and its representation of what constitutes a perfect world.
Artists to explore - Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, Romero Britto
Surface Pattern Collage
Surface pattern collage uses colours and shapes either borrowed from other images or specifically created using materials such as paint or inks. These images are seen as two dimensional and are often created as designs for products.
They are most often created as digital art or computer manipulated analogue pieces where a hand cut and glued collage is scanned and altered on a computer.
Contact
Please get in touch, via the contacts page or Instagram, if you are interested in taking part in a collage course, either online or in person.
