Category: collage

John O’Reilly

The Montage Work of John O’Reilly

Born in February of 1930 in Orange, New Jersey, John O’Reilly was an American artist whose intricate assemblages combine art, literature, history, and autobiography. His works of montage, both paper and photographic, investigate the issues of religion, violence and eroticism in society. O’Reilly studied at Syracuse University in New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1952. After serving in the Army, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1956 with a Master of Fine Arts. While at the Art Institute, he met sculptor James Tellin, who became his lifelong partner and, later, husband in 2013.

Upon graduation, O’Reilly supported himself as an art therapist at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for twenty-seven years. He made small, intricate photo-collages in private for many years, only sharing them with close friends. In O’Reilly’s work, foreground and background are merged together to form the plane on which are placed fragmented images: Greek statues, Titian paintings, heads of World War Two soldiers, self-portraits, clippings from gay porn magazines, and works by Cézanne, Caravaggio and Vermeer, among others. O’Reilly’s works are in the same tradition as that of the boxed found-object assemblages created by Joseph Cornell, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.

One of John O’Reilly’s first works was his 1965 “Self Portrait”, in which he combined polaroid images of himself with astronomic images and details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. During the 1970s, he combined in his collages images of  California’s west-coast modern architecture with works by Poussin, Titian and other historical art references. O’Reilly first started publicly exhibiting his photo montages at the age of fifty. One of his first exhibition was in 1983 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. O’Reilly exhibited his work multiple times through the 1980s, including solo shows at New York’s Alan Stone Gallery and Boston’s Howard Yezerski Gallery, and a 1985 group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

John O’Reilly’s main subject in his 1900s work was the topic of war which he felt was a great obscenity. Exhibitions during the period included group shows at the John Weber Gallery and the Wessel & O’Connor Gallery in New York, a solo exhibition at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery, and another group show at MOMA. In 1995, art dealer and curator Klaus Kertess, the owner of New York’s Bykert Gallery,  selected a number of O’Reilly’s images for inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Works during this period of the 1990s included stage dioramas from his series “Occupied Territories”, which featured bodies from gay porn magazines collaged to the heads of German soldiers from World War II; these newly eroticized figures were then attached to scenes from painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s landscapes. 

Starting in the early 2000s, O’Reilly began to remove his image from his photo montages. The collages became more dense in appearance, fragmented and austere with his only appearance being one reflected in images of glass shards. Endlessly suggestive, the montages contain shadows drifting from bodies and body parts wafting out of open mouths. Discarding the seamlessness of his previous works’ backgrounds, O’Reilly began using complex, intersecting lines at the edges of his collage work which pushed his work closer to abstraction.

John O’Reilly, at the age of ninety-one, died of a stroke on May 20th of 2021 in the Briarwood retirement community of Worcester. He was survived by his husband, James Tellin, and his brother Edward. The majority of O’Reilly’s work, a collection in excess of thirteen-hundred works, is now housed at the Addison Gallery of the Phillips Academy. His work is included in the collections of many museums including Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

“I have to fight intellect — my work needs to look like one unit without looking like a collage. It starts with an idea, then I go through book after book until I find something, over a long period of time. I call them montages, where one thing logically flows into another.”—John O’Reilly, The Brooklyn Rail, 2017

Note: A collection of twelve black and white photomontages by John O’Reilly can be found at the online Queer Arts Resource located at: http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/jun_98/oreilly/oreilly.html

Top Insert Image: Seth David Ruben, “John O’Reilly”, 2021

Second Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Tears”, 1999,  Polaroid Montage, 20 x 17.1 cm

Third Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Umbrella”, 1981, Paper Montage, 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Bottom Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “A Constellation”, 1982, Caseine and Halftone Montage, 25.4 x 17.3 cm

 

Hector de Gregorio

Paintings by Hector de Gregorio

Born in Valencia, Hector de Gregorio is a Spanish painter and digital artist. He had his foundational fine art taining at Camberwell Art College in London. Between 2004 and 2007, De Gregorio studied Fine Art at London’s Central Saint Martin’s, where he earned his BA in 2007. He later earned his MFA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in London in 2009. 

Hector de Gregorio was influenced in his formative years by his Catholic upbringing, which furthered his interests in devotional art from different religions, and by his mother, a dressmaker who taught him the skills of design and tailoring. He was also interested in European art: the sensuality of Filippo Lippi’s figures, the realism and dramatic lighting of Caravaggio’s work, the religious narrative works of Hieronymus Bosch, and the surrealist work of  Salvador Dali. All these elements combine to give de Gregorio’s work, although contemporary in appearance,  a familiar medieval atmosphere with overtones of a mythological or religious nature.

De Gregorio’s work is both meticulous and labor intensive. Each image entails extensive costume design research, photographic shoots, digital imaging, and hand finishing of the final image. De Gregorio begins by photographing his friends, dressed in personally made elaborate costumes, at his studio. Taking a number of photos from the shoot, he fashions a collage that distorts the perspective of the image. To these images, de Gregorio digitally adds elements such as colored backdrops, Latin phrases, and other motifs with either mythical or religious references. This finished product is printed on either canvas or fine art paper, and overlaid with waxes, oil paints, gold leaf and varnish.

Hector de Gregorio has exhibited widely, with exhibitions in London, Berlin, Milan, New York, Miami and Chicago.  In November 2009, he won the prestigious annual Young Masters Art Prize for his inspiring contemporary portraiture. In 2012 Hector de Gregorio exhibited his “Absinthes” in  “The Perfect Place to Grow”, an exhibition of work by the alumni of the Royal College of Art to celebrate its 175th anniversary.

Bottom Insert Image: Hector de Gregorio, “Self Portrait”, Date Unknown, Mexed Media on Paper

Tony Fitzpatrick

 

Etchings and Collages by Tony Fitzpatrick

Born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1958, Tony Fitzpatrick Is an American actor and artist. In the early 1980s, he seriously began drawing with colored pencils on slate boards in the gallery “The Edge”, located in Villa Park, Illinois. Working there during the day, he tended bar at night just across the street. It was during this time that Fitzpatrick developed strong friendships with film director Jonathan Demme and Chicago radio personality and bluesman Buzz Kilman.

During the late 1980s, Fitzpatrick began exhibiting in gallery shows in New York City and Chicago, selling his work and establishing a career as an artist. An accomplished poet, he has authored and illustrated eight books, including “The Hard Angels: Drawings and Poems” in 1988 and the 2015 essay and art book “Dime Stories”. With assistance from friends and local artists Theresa James and Steve Campbell of Landfall Press, Fitzpatrick opened in 1992 his Chicago printmaking studio, Big Cat Press, which exists today as the artist exhibition space Firecat Projects.

Tony Fitzpatrick’s artistic career originally centered on multi-colored drawings on slate, later followed by works presented through printmaking. He has more recently focused on producing multi-media collage drawings, which blend cartoonish drawing, found images, text, and  ephemera, such as baseball cards and matchbooks. His subjects have included: memories of his father, the cities of Chicago and New Orleans, hobo symbols, super-heroes, and Japan.

Fitzpatrick’s works are in private collections and numerous public institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  He has done cover art for albums, such as the Neville Brothers “Yellow Moon”, nominated for the Diamond Award: Best Album Cover, and Lou Reed’s album “Big Cat”. Working as an actor, Fitzpatrick had roles in “Primal Fear”, “Philadelphia”, and “Married to the Mob”.  

Takahiro Kimura

Takahiro Kimura, Titles Unknown, 2000, Paint and Collage on Canvas

Born in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Tokyo in 1965, Takahiro Kimura is a Japanese animator, illustrator, and character designer. He studied painting and graphic design at Salesian Polytechnic. Kimura later studied drawing, landscape painting and fashion design at Setsu Mode Seminar. While experimenting with collages and combining paint and photographs, he produced illustrations for books and advertisements. 

Kimura’s work focuses on the human face. His collages are formed by arranging different segments of facial photographs and applying overlays of paint. With this distortion process,  Kimura attempts to expose the human spirit in his figurative work. He has also produced several collage animations, a short film, and an art book entitled “Risky Dolls

Several of Takahiro Kimura’s animation films, as well as collages and paintings, can be found on http://www.faceful.jp/distinations/movie/

Michael Sansky

Michael Sansky, “Study for Giants and Dwarves VI”, 1998-2000, Collage, Oil and Plastic Objects on Carved Wood, Private Collection

Writing about the exhibition “Land Mine” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, art curator Jessica Hough wrote:

“In the kinetic sculpture from the series Giants and Dwarfs, Zansky manipulates scale using a series of large lenses positioned around a rotating carved wooden object. The object, which has been carved from plywood, looks like driftwood, a desiccated animal carcass, or a meteor – morph the viewer’s perspective so that the object continues to shape-shift. It is large and small; organic and celestial. Zansky’s sculpture, along with all of the work in “Land Mine”, reminds us that truth must be mined and that human history easily eludes us.”

Julia Lillard

Julia Lillard, “Spirit Animal”, Date Unknown, Collage

Julia Lillard is a self-taught Oklahoma artist who, for the most part, creates surreal digital and paper collage. Her first love was art photography, but in her 50s, that developed into a love for collage and abstract paintings. She has a range of styles that are somewhat eclectic, and her imagination is triggered by any image, color or situation that catches her attention. Julia lets something outside of herself take over and she usually has no idea what the end result will be.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://julialillard.tumblr.com

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Paysage aux Argus”, 1955, Collage with Butterfly Wings, Collection Fondation Dubuffet, Paris

“The things we truly love, the things forming the basis and roots of our being, are generally things we never look at. A huge piece of carpeting, empty and naked plains, silent and uninterrupted stretches with nothing to alter the homogeneity of their continuity. I love wide, homogenous worlds, unstaked, unlimited like the sea, like high snows, deserts, and steppes.”

“Art doesn’t go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.”                                                                             ― Jean Dubuffet

Michael Pajon

The Collage Artwork of Michael Pajon

Michael Pajon, born in 1979 in Chicago, currently lives and works in New Orleans. He attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating in 2003 with a focus in printmaking. Eventually gravitating to the graphic nature of the medium that closely resembled the comics he loved, Pajon worked closely as an assistant/studio manager to renowned artist Tony Fitzpatrick.

During this time, Pajon started making assemblages of the bits and pieces he had accumulated from alleys, junkshops, and thrift stores, slicing up old children’s book covers and rearranging their innards into disjointed tales of Americana. Pajon’s work has been exhibited in various venues worldwide, including the Illinois State Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; Nau-haus Art Space, Houston, and Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans.

“These maps, postcards, children’s book illustrations, matchbooks, sheet music, and calling cards are the guts and gristle of common things people collected over a life, spared the fate of being buried in the rubble and shadows of once prosperous towns. This group of work contemplates the most humble of human remains: old matchbooks from junk shops, antique postcards and books, sheet music, cracker jack toys, and other objects once treasured, lost and resurrected. By collaging these elements amidst drawings and other media, I create small relationships to arrive at a whole image. Like delicate strands of DNA, these tiny pieces in combination hold the key to unique identity – the common as well as the fantastic.” – Michael Pajon

Carmine Santaniello

Carmine Santaniello, “Amore”, Lithograph, 9 x 12 Inches

Collage is an integral part of New York City-based Carmine Santaniello’s art and is usually the starting point for each work. Employing the traditional method of cut and glued paper, he creates new faces out of amassed facial images. He incorporates elements of his own photographs of exterior environments such as graffiti or street art. Some works remain as collage, some become drawings, some artist books or articulated paper dolls, but most become monoprints utilizing lithography.

Through the juxtaposition of techniques and mediums, he creates evocatively charged works of art. These new works have an erotic edge with a voyeuristic feel to them. Each subject is confined behind a the vale of marred graffiti-like images.

Reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: http://carminesantaniellofineart.blogspot.com    and   https://www.etsy.com/in-en/listing/585432108/original-art-monoprint-lithograph-gay

Being and Nothingness

Artist Unknown, “Embrace Nothingness”, Collage, Noirgraph

“From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.” –

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Image reblogged with many thanks to the artist’s site: https://noirgraph.tumblr.com

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet, “Casino la Colle”, November 1955, Oil on Canvas Collage on Canvas, 23 x 28 Inches, Private Collection

Jean Dubuffet was an integral French artist known for his primal paintings and sculptures of vernacular subjects. His adoption of the term Art Brut or raw art, referred to the art of children, prisoners, and the mentally ill, was a reaction to what he called art culturel or refined art. It was his desire to break from tradition by implementing rudimentary mark making and emulsions made from sand, tar, and trash.

“A work of art is only of interest, in my opinion, when it is an immediate and direct projection of what is happening in the depth of a person’s being. It is my belief that only in this Art Brut can we find the natural and normal processes of artistic creation in their pure and elementary state.” – Jean Dubuffet

Adam Collier Noel

Adam Collier Noel, “ Hunting the Hart (For Frida)”, Collage, Painting

“The “For Frida” series utilizes paper ephemera consisting of receipts, handwritten letters, playing cards, blue prints, etc. as a way of constructing my own nostalgic portraits. A silhouette is then transferred over the collage leaving revealing a figurative window of my found object composition. The black squares act as the framework for a void or missing part of the individual.            – Adam Collier Noel

Image reblogged with thanks to the artist’s site: http://adamcolliernoel.tumblr.com

José Naranja

José Naranja: Sketchbooks

José Naranja beautifully detailed sketchbooks by collaging elements of photography, writing, stamps, and his own precise drawings of everything from poison mushrooms to a bird’s eye view of his dream studio. The ex-aeronautic engineer began working with sketchbooks after he discovered pocket-size Moleskine notebooks in 2005 and realized they were the perfect vessel to document his daily experiences and develop his wildest ideas. After 13 years of using the same style of notebook, Naranja now crafts his own by hand.

“It creates a special link between my journals and me. Drawings of calligraphy are just useful tools to express ideas They are the visible layer in the whole notebook as a piece, a mandala, and it’s the final artwork. Every detail in the process should be taken into consideration because I give the best effort. At the moment they have given me back only good news.”- José Naranja

The sketchbook artist also sells edited copies of his best work in a compilation called “The Orange Manuscript”, which you can find on his website.

Tadanori Yokoo

Illlustration by Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo’s work, while highly successful commercially, is deeply personal. Employing his own themes, pictures, and references to himself and his anti-modernist collage style, his approach is instantly recognizable and individual. He has said that he learned in the late 1960s “to escape from compromise when designing by linking my creations directly to my lifestyle.”

Yokoo’s work crosses the border between design and fine art. Seemingly devoid of limitations or rules, his paintings are warm, autobiographical, and mystical and draw on a variety of seemingly incongruous influences such as spiritualism, Japanese aesthetics, the psychedelic posters of the ’60s, science fiction, and comic art. It also consciously draws on Ukiyo-e, or “the art of the floating world,” whose themes express the impermanence of life.

Several motifs recur in Yokoo’s work. His fascination with waterfalls borders on obsession. In 1999, in a group exhibition titled “Ground Zero Japan” at the Mito Museum of Art, Yokoo filled an entire room from floor to ceiling with postcards of waterfalls which were reflected in a black mirrored floor. Other exhibitions on the subject include “Craze for Waterfalls” at the Kirin Art Space Harajuku and “Tadanori Yokoo’s Magical Make a Pilgrimage Round” exhibition. In 1992, Absolut Vodka commissioned him to design an advertisement titled Absolut Yokoo featuring twenty-five of his waterfall paintings.

Yokoo is also known for his science-fiction posters and Ken Takakura gangster-film posters, and his designs have been used for theater sets in Japan and Italy.

David Hockney

David Hockney, “Pearblossom Hwy. 11- 18th April 1986, #2″, Chromogenic Print, J. Paul Getty Museum

“Pearblossom Highway (the painting) shows a crossroads in a very wide open space, which you only get a sense of in the western United States… . [The] picture was not just about a crossroads, but about us driving around. I’d had three days of driving and being the passenger. The driver and the passenger see the road in different ways. When you drive you read all the road signs, but when you’re the passenger, you don’t, you can decide to look where you want. And the picture dealt with that: on the right-hand side of the road it’s as if you’re the driver, reading traffic signs to tell you what to do and so on, and on the left-hand side it’s as if you’re a passenger going along the road more slowly, looking all around. So the picture is about driving without the car being in it.”     – David Hockney

Thus David Hockney described the circumstances leading to the creation of this photocollage of the scenic Pearblossom Highway north of Los Angeles. His detailed collage reveals the more mundane observations of a road trip. The littered cans and bottles and the meandering line where the pavement ends and the sand begins point to the interruption of the desert landscape by the roads cutting through it and the imprint of careless travelers.

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni, “The Charge of the Lancers”, 1915, Collage, Tempera Paint, Cardboard

Umberto Boccioni was one of the lead artists in the Italian Futurist movement of the early 1900s.  His most famous works are in bronze, where the energy of his forms are represented by a solid trail following a figure.  In “The Charge of the Lancers”, Boccioni depicts a fierce cavalry trampling soldiers with bayonets. The forceful power of this image is an excellent visual representation of the ideas of the futurists.

The “Charge of the Lancers” is the only known work by Boccioni that is devoted exclusively to the theme of war. Being a collage, Charge was also a rare departure for the artist in terms of medium. In previous works, Boccioni had used the figure of the horse as a symbol for work, but in this collage the horse becomes a symbol of war and natural strength, since it appears to be overcoming a horde of German bayonets.

If, in fact, Boccioni was establishing the brute strength of the horse over man-made weapons, it would suggest a slight departure from the Futurist principles of Marinetti. This work also eerily prefigures Boccioni’s own death from having been trampled by a horse.

Futurism was founded by the writer Filipo Tommaso Marinetti, and was joined by a handful of young artists, including Umberto Boccioni at the forefront. Based on Marinetti’s radical manifesto of 1909, Futurism was an extremely fast paced and modern movement.

Kelly Moore

Kelly Moore, “Dead Cowboy Retablo”

Kelly Moore is a self-taught artist who has no formal training or education in art. His original and expressionist work has been referred to as Outsider Art, Art Brut, Raw Art and Visionary Art. His intuitive style and technique reflects a raw, primitive quality that is frequently juxtaposed with a startling innocence. He is currently living and working in New Mexico.