Contemporary Collage Week 9 : Cubomania, Shape Shifting and Picture Making

  This week in Contemporary Collage  we were tracing shapes and accurately cutting out  and inserting replacements in coloured paper ( 'marquetry') and  using grids , cutting and swapping  ('cubomania')  

As usual we  had a whistlestop  tour through various artists  including John Baldessari ( above and below) 

Luc Tuymans

Ewan Gibbs  uses knitting pattern grids as marks 

Dan Hayes  creates  huge photorealistic paintings constructed of  a multitude  of intricately coloured squares ( detail above )   

 I've admired the photomontages of David Hockney  for  a long time

As usual the images  I brought to use were mainly unsuitable  for the exercises  - time to raid the magazine box for inspiration.  My homages to David Hockney included a  designer lamp ( above ) and a curvy chair ( below) 

A collection of cups and saucers provided the inspiration for the collage below - not sure about the white spaces between

Playing with  a photo of a seaside shelter at Birchington, replacing sections with brightly coloured paper provided a contrast to the 'painterly' peeling woodwork .

My favourite though was the picture of legs  from a magazine ( a BMW ad I think)   where I  traced the shoe and a line of the denim jeans  and replaced  these with orange and blue paper 

 Interesting effect when use invert filter in Photoshop  but I digress....

 When  I started experimenting  with the shapes leftover from cutting out the shoes and the tracings , Simon  introduced me to the works  of Francis Alys , particularly the shoe shine  works  which  are constructed from multiple layers of tracings ( giving the effect of animation ) with the masking tape  used to secure left in to provide  additional marks 

So in the last 5 minutes of the class I quickly assembled a collection of tracings and cutouts of the shoe in different colours, attached to the paper just with strips of masking tape. This is just 1 permutation, the beauty of this is that I can  make multiple variations . There's definately a theme developing of  using  the negative  cutouts left when cutting out shapes and using tracings . Most fun so far ( apart from desecrating 'Dinghy Sailing' ) in what has been a very enjoyable course. 

Next week 'Text' - I'm off to look  for some different fonts.  Once again my Journal Quilts from 2011 seem  appropriate  ( the 'Circle' ones include those cutouts!)