Arrogant Collagist!

Although I'm somewhat of a stubborn artist and have issues between skilful work and work that's just plain easy to do, that anybody, given time can do. collaging and oil pastels lived very closely for me, in that category of unskilful art. I was advised to begin a collage sketchbook in the second year of my degree as a 'letting go' process of me getting irritated with my overthinking of things. it really took a lot of me, to sift through magazines and decide what to put where, does it work, does it need something else.. ARGH!

These are some of my most favoured ones from last year:

I suppose it's quite arrogant of me to not acknowledge my collages as art, just because they're cut outs from other peoples work, I mean, somebody else took the time to shoot, edit and publish that image, I feel like I'm almost stealing art when putting these collages together. On the other hand, I'm taking those images which have been placed out there for people to look at and use, and applying them into a new element, and creating a piece of work which will strip any previous identity from this image and fruit it into my practice. Initially, these helped me in terms of compositional ideas and arrangements, for paintings and drawings, which admittedly is something I'd recommend for any artist block!

However, this year, I pushed myself into automatic art, attempting to let go of these disciplines of an image looking aesthetically pleasing or proportionally correct. I sat in front of my TV and just put images that I'd collected and cut out which appealed to me, and stuck them together. I'm an artistic hoarder so technically, material isn't an issue.

I shall post updates, when I've made a little more progress!

#collage #surrealism #surreal