Recycled Art: Collage (Part 2)

“Every artist needs to find the right material through which he can express himself.” -David Mach, sculptor

Last week I wrote about a method of recycling old magazines etc to produce a work of art. In terms of collage making, this is an effective, but basic technique. However, artists are not restricted to paper based materials when creating their artwork. Almost any unwanted object can be recycled to become a part of a bigger, creative picture.

Here are a few examples of artists that use a broad range of resources:

Jane Perkins

I am a ‘re-maker’, taking inspiration from found objects and working them into something new.

Using mostly plastic materials (buttons, beads etc), Jane Perkins recreates paintings by the Old Masters. Inspired by Impressionism, Perkins’s artwork needs to be viewed from a distance to see the full picture, however a close-up look will reveal the thousands of ‘found’ objects used to produce such amazing outcomes.

Tom Deininger

Tom Deininger also uses plastics in his collages. If you look closely at his artworks, you will see that they are made up of small toys as well as buttons and other everyday objects. Not only must it be difficult to create a realistic image from the amalgamation of material, but we can imagine finding objects of the precise colour is a nightmare.

Zac Freeman

My final example today is Zac Freeman. Similarly to the previous two artists, Freeman uses found objects or ‘junk’ to build portraits that are better off viewed at a distance. Up close, evidence of buttons, beads, broken computer parts and lego bricks can be seen amongst the collection of materials. Whereas Perkins and Deininger painstakingly sought out particular colours,  Freeman has been more relaxed, using a rainbow of colour to produce an interesting effect.

What can you make with all the junk and unwanted objects around you? Perhaps you could recycle it into a fantastic work of art!

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Recycled Art: Collage

Recycled art is not something that’s beautiful but just a waste of time and space. It’s like alchemy which turns base metal into gold, except that it turns trashes into gold.

In this day and age, recycling is something that is regarded as extremely important. The government leads us to believe that we are doing something good for the environment by placing paper, cardboard, plastic bottles etc into specially labelled bins. In actually fact, recycling is something that humans have been doing for centuries – it is human nature to reuse things, make-do-and-mend or just “I think I’ll put this broken thing in the shed, it may come in handy one day.”

Recycling can also play a role in art. Every artist is always creating some new – a new portrait, a new landscape painting, a new drawing and so forth. In fact, it is impossible to produce something old. The methods in which the artist goes about making their masterpiece, however, is not limited to new materials. Using pre-existing materials within artworks has become fairly popular in recent years. One such method is collage – a combination of materials stuck onto a backing to produce a picture or pattern.

Derek Gores

American artist Derek Gores, encompasses the idea of recycling in his captivating collages.  From using very simple materials – magazines and labels amongst other printed elements – Gores creates realistic images. From a distance, some of his work could be mistaken for photographs, which is amazing considering that they are nothing but cut up pieces of paper.

Gores is mostly influenced by past abstract painters – those whose works have so much going on, it is difficult to completely focus on the overall picture without being distracted by the odd element. Although his work is not abstract in the same sense, there is so much to look at due to the significant amount of collaged parts, that it becomes impossible to view in the same way one might look at a photograph or painting.

Whether or not Gores is possibly contributing to the environmentally conscious world through his use of recycled material is up for debate, but it is admittedly a fantastic and beautiful way of doing so. Anyone can cut up paper and stick it down, yet to create such vivid, lifelike images is a very rare skill – something for us all to be jealous of!

Text Art

Since the invention of the computer, typography has gradually entered the creative world as an art form, rather than a procedure involved in printing. Contemporary graphic designers use typography to express a message without solely relying on the actual words used. Certain typefaces can depict anger, whereas others are calmer, old fashioned, innocent and so forth. On the other hand, some artists use typography in a completely different way.

When drawing a portrait, for example, the artist has a wide choice of media: pencil, ink, watercolour, acrylic etc; but how they use this equipment is entirely up to them. Throughout history, artistic style has changed rapidly as the result of numerous art movements. In the present day, it is hard to say exactly what the current style is since artists tend to appropriate ideas from bygone eras. One thing that is unique to contemporary art, however, is text art – creating images using words or letters.

With a computer, providing it has the relevant software, it is easy to place typography in certain positions, change sizes, alter colours, switch from bold to italic etc. By trial and error (or a well written tutorial) it is possible to produce a work of art purely made up of typefaces.

On a recent trip to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, I got the opportunity to view some rather interesting art works. Two of these were forms of text art, yet instead of a computer, the entire thing had been created by hand. Knowing how easy it is to rectify inevitable mistakes on a digital version, I was amazed at the precision and accuracy the artists had achieved, particularly as there is no “undo” button in real life.

For something that many people achieve digitally, it must have taken ages to carefully plan the portraits before putting pen to paper. Not only the position and size of the text, but the pen thickness needs to be carefully thought about in order to create the portrait. Above are the two examples exhibited at Ripley’s. On the left is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which not only is created using calligraphy, has been executed in one continuous line! The text is Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, the portrait of Obama has also been made up with the words of a speech, in this instance, the Inaugural speech he made on 20th January 2009.

The artist who created the Barack Obama text art, Daniel Duffy, has produced many similar portraits of well-known people. Copies of Duffy’s art work have been sold to numerous fans, mostly in Philadelphia. His outcomes are much more impressive than a digitally produced version due to the evidence of the time and hard work needed to complete them.

Below are a few more examples of Daniel Duffy’s text art:

Ardizzone: A Retrospective

‘The supreme contemporary example of the genuine illustrator’
Maurice Sendak on Edward Ardizzone, 1967

At present, the House of Illustration, in London, is holding the first major exhibition in decades of the 20th century illustrator Edward Ardizzone (1900-79). From my own research, conducted when writing my dissertation in 2012, I was already aware of Ardizzone’s influence within children’s literature, however from attending the gallery, I soon learnt this was not his only area of authority.

Edward Ardizzone is known amongst children’s book illustrators as the creator of the Little Tim stories. These first appeared at the very end of the 1930s, however Ardizzone had already found success as an illustrator. Before turning to literature, Ardizzone’s art work featured in magazines such as Radio Times as well as a number of other publishers. Later in his career, Ardizzone was commissioned to produce cover art for a number of books published by Puffin. Books in this series included Stig of the Dump (1963) and The Otterbury Incident (1961).

Between 1940 and 1945, Ardizzone used the Second World War as a means of creating art. Using the same method as his book illustrations – pen and wash – Ardizzone continued to produce atmospheric illustrations, however with a more adult nature. Despite the subject matter, Ardizzone’s drawings look similar regardless of target audience. He got his inspiration from observing the world around him, closely looking at individuals and taking into account the changes current events inflicted on scenery (e.g. war).

What is perhaps most interesting about the exhibition, Ardizzone: A Retrospective, is perceiving the development of Ardizzone’s artistic skill and career path throughout his lifetime. The House of Illustration displays previously unseen original illustrations that Ardizzone composed toward the beginning of his art journey, as well as hundreds of other examples that reflect the diversity of his work. Amongst copies of well known posters and book covers, arranged around the gallery are initial sketches, caricatures and, rather surprisingly, the odd ceramic.

Edward Ardizzone appealed to me as an artist due to my love of 20th century picture books. After viewing the exhibition, I am even more impressed with his artwork as he proves that illustrations are not only for children. A clever drawing evokes more emotion than any photograph could.

Ardizzone: A Retrospective will be held at the House of Illustration until 22nd January 2017.