13 posts tagged “collage”
I opened a subscription to Vogue. Interested in their high fashion images. Kind of a shift from my Wired source material, hope to work them together at some point, but fun to work with a new kind of input.
Two new collages. The first one, Sorry..., came together nicely, in terms of the black tones, and the suggested image created by the juxtaposition, that one image seems to be speaking to another. I like the brief hints of bright yellow and red, and the link between the chaotic visual lines of the building and the stress on the female figure's face.
The second one is simpler, but I'm happy with it as well, a quiet suggestion of brain waves, and the background figure almost jumping from the foreground figure's head, taking readings. I like the color harmony with the light or muted tones as well.
This is a collage I made back in January, and didn't scan until now. I'm happy with it, generally: themes of surface texture, consumerism, and the personal quest. Cerberus was the three headed dog that guarded the gateway to Hades in Greco-Roman mythology. He's featured also in Dante's Inferno.
Two new collage. Not my favorites, kind of chaotic, not much flow, or focal points. The source image was printed on really high stock paper, which was nice, but hard to appreciate in a scan. Nice sense of density, and a kind of glittering brightness to the city images.
Finished two new collages this week. In both of these, I wished for a way to resize certain elements. Creating in Photoshop seems more and more attractive. Fun to work with black marker a bit on #1. Might order some wide tip black markers to do more with that.
Both feel rewarding in terms of the regular themes: juxtaposition, recontextualizing. Fun to tuck the small images around the large ones in Heroes, a byproduct of waiting to glue everything down. The horizontal watch "belt" in Ganesh is a bit repetitive, but I love using these enormous detail photos of intricate watches. Back to the resizing question....
Three pieces this evening, or four depending on how you see it.
This one got more and more interesting as I worked on it. At first glimpse, I saw very strong geometry in the image, no background, just these shapes of fabric and skin in close juxtaposition. I started out by removing the girl from her context, then ended up with all these funny puzzle piece images of the guy, with this negative image left on the white paper by her absence.
Reassembling the puzzle piece images creates an interesting sense of isolation that seems present even in the unaltered image: this tension of closeness but distance, anonymity within that. In a sense, these two images perfectly accentuate the feeling for me of the original image, by "separating" the two subjects. A more perfect expression would be to remove the liquor bottle as it's own third page. You'll see that no subject is left completely whole in isolation, a variation on the "God shaped hole" construct--each person left with an "other shaped hole." This idea would be taken to it's full expression by removing the bottle as well, leaving a "bottle shaped hole" in the girl, and a "hand shaped hole" in even the bottle itself. Mutually using an used.
I also think that separating the images makes the suggestive element of his grasping hand more explicit. It seems like he is really groping her, something only lightly framed in the source image.
This all sounds cynical and negative about Madison Avenue, but I prefer the term...perceptive. ;)
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This next one is unedited. Just a lovely juxtaposition of image and text. Something about it is very dreamlike to me, I couldn't really cut it up. It has three very clear layers, at least, to me--surface text, deeper plane, then deepest patchwork fields below it. The text provides very strong background noise to the image, almost like a cloud formation, with the plane visible through a "glimpse" in the middle of it. In fact, drawing marker "could" curves around the image would be a cool way to frame this effect.
It works better as a full sheet magazine page, but clicking through twice with make this image its maximum size.
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Lastly, a work in progress. I ran out of time to work in this, but I like the start, basically two images added to the base text and black and white. The page itself was quite elegant, with crisp contrast between image and text on top and bottom halves. It's fun to take a leap from that elegant source with the QE2 image, and the Monacon royal family, as well of thinking about design over design, reformatting what was already very carefully and intentionally laid out.
This is also the first image where I've starting waiting to glue the images down. The ship came well before the portrait. Looking to continue this further, see if I like the flexibility in crafting foreground and background.
:)
Completed two new collages tonight.
I can see some things I wanted to do differently here, but finally needed to just let it go. Again with this one appreciating the sense of layers. Painful to let go of some of the lower images (applied first), but again interesting to see how the overall image takes shape as new layers are added. I think it speaks as well to the insidious relationship to attention in modern culture--everyone wants it, and take a variety of tacks to wrest it from competing messages, and your own personal thoughts. This quality of sensory overload, and a "what have they done for you lately? Hi, I'm a 5-story billboard for a new perfume."
Some noticeable interplay between the images, but that wasn't an intentional effect. I'm trying to avoid cute or gimmicky things, and making each collage the outcome of a string of individual aesthetic decisions. In that sense, it seems really about the process of choosing, of making many choices in a row, and how those choices define the space.
This one received less attention in construction. I like the quality of isolation to the central figures. Repurposing superiority into isolation. A general interplay of luxury goods, I suppose. I was interested in doing more with dark tones in this piece, had time permitted. An interesting start, but needed a few more layers to really get somewhere, in my opinion.
Cheers :)
I was able to complete two new collages. Both of these were pleasant in there own way, but I'm struggling to avoid composing before fixing the images. It seems important, just as images come to us outside of our choosing, to implement the images in a strict sequential order, reinforcing the deciding power of media, expressed in television by the question, "well, what's on?" (Tivo, of course, bringing an interesting new chapter to this producer-consumer image relationship).
Still, with the second piece, I hoped to preserve all the lines on the lefthand jumping girl, but gave it up to use her as the first image. There is a secondary impact to deliberately squandering, squashing those lines with the subsequent images, a role of chance that seems expressive in a way. I think of Pollack, tilting his paint cans randomly over his horizontal canvases.
On the first piece, Tryptech, I realized soon after that the title itself was a misspelling of the medieval term, but my inability to recall it ended up seeming just as telling in the juxtaposition of past and present. This piece definitely expresses my interest in chronological layering, with the last image in some ways being the most definitive, so that my choice comes in the cutting, in the omitting, in the selecting of attention, but that the images themselves kind of co-shape the narrative of the image, before it is finally set. It does seem significant to use a gentle hand in altering the images, like a Japanes Zen garden, emphasizing the existing nature of the images just as much as my efforts to alter them.
Cheers :)
I've recently completed another collage. This one was a fun examination of primarily fall colors, dry natural palatte that I noticed in a fall issue of Wired magazine. It was fun to aim for that tonal consistency, to keep the colors within a certain range or temperature. Against that collusion the bright artificiality of the hot neon sun, both its difference and the others similarity made more noticeable by their being joined together.
This one was fun for me, particularly in executing great care in preparing the pieces, met against a looser method of actually applying them. Precision being partly undermined by inexact execution, another tension.
Thirdly, it was fun to create the collages as separate entities, but also linked together, something like a double cd music release, a la Stadium Arcadium or Mellon Collie. They could stand on their own, but a new layer of context is provided by joining them together. Fun stuff... :)
* double click once to see the images alone, then doubleclick twice to see them superlarge. (You may need to disable "Automatic Image Resizing" in your browser to see them full size). :)
