At the start of the pandemic, I turned to collage as a simple way to make art at home with materials I had lying around: magazines, glue, scissors. When I started collaging, I arbitrarily gave myself two rules: no humans and no text were allowed in the images. The first collages were primarily centered around color and design.
An early collage from last year that features two giraffes, a chicken nugget, and lots of orange
An early collage from last year that features a box of fireworks, some flowers, and lots of purple
But over time I started to notice that some of the same themes and subjects kept unintentionally appearing.
An early collage from last year that features coral wearing sunglasses (left), and a seal swimming with trash (right)
An early collage from last year that features a hungry cat, an old car, and an animal skull eating coins
And eventually humans and text started showing up.
A collage from last year that features a stack of cookies with a face and a shoe, and the text: “What will it be like to fly in a jet?” (left), and a lady with a TV, a pigeon, and the text: “We’re shrinking” (right)
I made collages in a kraft paper sketchbook for about six months in 2020. When January 2021 was about to come around, I decided to shift the project a little and switch to a different book to house the collages: Cats by Paddy Cutts. I had this good-sized book already lying around, full of glossy photographs of cats.
A new book to house my collages: Cats by Paddy Cutts
I decided to make a collage a day in 2021 based on one-word prompts—I found a list of 365 one-word art prompts to follow online. The prompts give me a place to start and an easy way to organize imagery. This project reflects a “parts to a whole” approach that is unusual for me—individually the collages aren’t that spectacular, but collected together in a book that you can flip through, representing a span of time, seems interesting.
A two-page collage in the Cats book based on the prompt “Time”—imagery includes a watch, some eggs, an old piano, and a junkyard
I’ll share here a few of my favorite recent collages, and in a future post I’ll explain more about how collaging led me to the print project I am working on now.
Three recent collages from the Cats book (left to right): “Fresh” (a cat with a bow, and Little Richard), “Energy” (a lot of accordions, and some batteries), and “Difference” (an old-timey man in a large tree, and a USA-woman with a tiny horse)