Praeterita

I just got back to Chicago from teaching a two-day workshop at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. That's the adult programs part of the renowned Interlochen Arts Academy, the high school for gifted kids. I always start this class by handing out small pieces of matboard and asking people to create five small collages, with only five minutes for each one. Some great results: For the rest of the class, we work on building up larger pieces: And finally, before everyone goes their separate ways, we have a small show-and-tell: If you live withint driving distance of Traverse City, look out for this class on their website in 2019.

When I was at high school in the north-east of England, our form teacher (the teacher who marked us as 'present' or 'absent' each morning) would joke about our art classes by calling them "cut and clag". Clag=north-east English slang for glueing, or collage. Well, I've just spent a week doing classes in "cut and clag" at the Interlochen Center for Creative Arts. Here are some of the 3" x 5" collages that I ask people to make as a warm-up: Here is a nice one done after I led people through a writing activity that led them to explore personal memories (grandmother's knitting, in this case): And here's one created by tearing two different magazine pages into strips and then recombining them: Good clagging!

Teaching a class in Mixed Media Collage last weekend, I used the digital projector in the room to show some examples of collage going back to the Cubists. Here is one by Georges Braque from about 1913: One of the participants was inspired to produce this: That is really pretty good! She tried out the pencil shading at the right and left, though not the quotations of parts of instruments that Braque drew. But the choice of papers, the cutting, and the placement, are all excellent. The day also produced these collages from different participants (all are 10" x 15"): Some tips that I've found useful for making collages: Use acrylic matte medium to glue down magazine pages and newspaper, thin decorative papers, etc. Use acrylic gel medium  to glue down thicker materials such as fabric, and to embed three dimensional materials such as buttons. When everything is dry, coat the collage front and back with acrylic matter medium. This seals the front, a...

A few days ago, I visited the studio of artist Amy Crum, in her home near the Chicago River. We sat for over an hour next to a window with a view of treetops and plants, looking at her recent work spread out on the floor around us. She's recently returned to making art after a long break, and what she's been doing are collages with some ink and paint additions, all on letter-sized paper. The collage originates in vintage newspapers and magazines from Europe, which gives the overall tone of her pieces a subdued, cool, look. You can spot all kinds of individual objects and stylistic pattern in the source material (flowers, letters, clothes) but each piece is clearly about the abstract pattern of Amy's arrangement of these bits and pieces. They all occupy an elongated space in the middle of the paper, either vertically or horizontally, and the forms spiral out and back in on themselves repeatedly, no matter which side you see them from. It reminded me of looking at the pat...

Here's three new small collages from my sketchbook, as yet untitled:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader