marysgardens

Recently, I took a challenging course offered by the Oregon Society of Artists via Zoom called Mind Boggling – 2D Collage offered by Poca Kim. The strategy of the art course is to learn how to take an artist’s earlier paintings and artwork and make them into new art by cutting them up and designing a collage. Poca Kim brings excitement and humor into the room while she works with us to develop our collages.

For the class, I chose to cut up several watercolors of nature scenes that I had completed and then reshaped them into a collage of a child playing an instrument.

I chose this theme for my collage because owing to the coronavirus pandemic, children are staying home. School is often canceled, or attended only on-line. Children’s play is built around what they can find in their homes to play with, as they cannot play with others so easily owing to social-distancing. I wanted to build a collage based on this idea, using several watercolors that I had earlier painted of nature scenes.

Having prepared the collage of the dancing child, I then decided to have the child be a type of “Pied Piper”.

Looking at what happened during this class, I personally prefer the painting that I have called “Pandemic Home School Child” to the final painting that I did for the course called “Pied Piper Child.” I prefer the roughness and chaos of the “Home School” painting which is more in line with the chaos and playfulness of kids. This does not mean that I needed to stop at one point in this class project rather than going to the next. Each stopping point is providing a kind of wonder of its own. Classes are supposed to make us think, and consider new options to our art goals.

Here are some of the things that I learned from this very interesting collage class.

First, the technique of using my old painting for collage pieces was very different than cutting and using other artist’s work or magazine art to make a collage. There was a personal touch to cutting up my own paintings as I remembered making the marks.

Second, while cutting up my art pieces and moving them into the collage, I also considered my previous work as it related to color, shape, brush marks and line choices, without thought to the final illustration for which they were originally used. It amused me that even after the paintings were cut up and moved around, they still looked like my personal work to me. I liked the idea that these earlier works resulted in useful images for the collage. It taught me that the lines themselves, the color choices, the movements of the brush across the paper all had subtle meanings that reached beyond the simple original illustration.

Third, using the collage as a starting point made up of pre-constructed materials encouraged me to creatively move beyond old paintings and discover new value in their colors, lines and brushwork.

Fourth, I focused very steadily on the composition for a considerable amount of time, freely moving pieces about to fashion my idea, before moving on to the painting itself. The activity of working through my compositional ideas via a collage left everything open and optional, shifting the composition again and again, as long as I did not glue anything down.

I think the concept of abstract art is starting to take shape in my mind more clearly through this collage and I want to work on it further.

Having completed this first assignment for the class, I am thinking of doing this collage-painting again, but this time even more abstractly, using acrylics.

This new goal is leaving me a bit stumped at the moment, but with time, I think that I will figure it out.

Taking this course with Poca Kim has made me ask, how does one’s mindset shift meaningfully from the art of illustration to that of abstract art, or vice versa? What role does structure and composition play in all of this?

I am finding that physically moving the composition around meaningfully via the collage is one way to consider this important question.