Tag: collage

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.

Yang Yongliang

Digital Photographic Artwork of Yang Yongliang

Yang Yongliang, a young artist from China, combines traditional Chinese Shan Shui (literally, mountain water) art with digital techniques to create “ghost landscapes,” which offer a dreamy techno vision of man and his environment. While the videos and pictures have a striking sense of harmony, they are also somehow unsettling. Industrial images, pollution, and waste have replaced the traditional country idyll.

“The city is the place where I live, a space that evolves with me and which contains my memories. A mirage or ghost-city is the environment towards which I reach out, but it only exists in my imagination. The water of the mountain (the landscape) suggests the imitation of the traditional art forms of my childhood, which have gradually disappeared as the city and I have evolved.

The birth of the Ghost Landscape is not an accident. The city, the landscape – I love them and hate them at the same time. If I love the city for its familiarity, I hate it even more for the staggering speed at which it grows and engulfs the environment. If I like traditional Chinese art for its depth and inclusiveness, I hate its retrogressive attitude. The ancients expressed their sentiments and appreciation of nature through landscape painting. As for me, I use my own landscape to criticize reality as I perceive it.”- Yang Yongliang

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, 50 x 32 cm, Private Collection

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.

Conrad Marca-Relli

Conrad Marca-Relli, Untitled, Collage and Mixed Media on Canvas, 1960, 138 x 172 cm

Marca-Relli is considered one of the main exponents of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, and he was involved in the movement from its conception as he organized the first Abstract Expressionist show at the Ninth Street Show in 1951, with the artist Franz Kline and the gallerist Leo Castelli.

This important exhibition marked the beginning of the new uniquely American artistic movement, which is based on revolutionary painting methods, notably, Action Painting.  Artists that participated in this exhibition included: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Barnet Newman, Hans Hoffman, Franz Klien and Conrad Marca-Relli.

Michael deMeng

The Artwork of Michael deMeng

Michael deMeng is an assemblage artist from Vancouver, Canada who exhibits throughout the United States. As an educator, he has been actively involved with VSA Montana, providing art education and encouraging participation in the arts to people with disabilities. Through these activities, as well as his artwork, deMeng fosters community awareness, and offers creative methods to explore the human experience.

In his art, he addresses issues of transformation. Discarded materials find new and unexpected uses in his work; they are reassembled and conjoined with unlikely components, a form of rebirth from the ashes into new life and new meaning.

These assemblages are metaphors for the evolutions and revolutions of existence: from life to death to rebirth, from new to old to renewed, from construction to destruction to reconstruction. These forms are examinations of the world in perpetual flux, where meaning and function are ever-changing.

Kurt Schwitters

 

Kurt Schwitters, “The Spring Door”, 1938

Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters on June 20, 1887, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles.

In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. Schwitters’s earliest “Merzbilder” date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the ‘Der Sturm’ periodical. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920.

At the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimer, Germany, in 1922, Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose ‘De Stijl’ principles influenced his work.  About 1923, the artist started to make his first “Merzbau”, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the structure grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio.  In 1932, Schwitters joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their publication of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second “Merzbau”. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third “Merzbau” in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died on January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England.

Suzanne Moxhay

Interiors: Photography by Suzanne Moxhay

Born in Essex in 1976, Suzanne Moxhay studied painting at Chelsea College of Art before going on to the Royal Academy Schools where she graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art in 2007. She was then selected for a year long residency at the Florence Trust Studios, London where she developed the ‘Borderlands’ series.

Despite their unsettling nature, Moxhay’s dreamlike scenes have a deep narrative that leaves the viewer thinking about what has been and what’s to come. Whether they’re intending to be a metaphor for life and our existence, a comment about the environment and the state of our planet or just images of an imagined world, they speak out, which is what, paired with their excellent execution, validates them as complex and intelligent photographic works. Created by building and photographing miniature scenes and then digitally blending them with found images, printing with a soft edge is one of the processes used to create the all-important sense of distance.