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Cutting and pasting: from pages to pixels
The enduring allure of collage
Who doesn’t remember sitting at school with a pile of magazines in the center of a table and scissors and glue at the ready? It was collage time. The oversized white paper in front of you was your canvas. You flipped the magazines’ pages and looked for images. What you decided to cut and glue on your paper was entirely up to you. There were no rules.
I loved collage art from the very start. The idea of connecting images from unrelated sources to create a new work of art seemed both playful and challenging to me. What if I glue a large fish to the rear seat of a fancy new convertible as if it were sitting up, enjoying the wind on its face? What if that car is resting on a calm body of water? What if a pack of wild wolves is chasing it? What if…? Imagine the possibilities.
Collage — from the French word coller, meaning to glue or to stick — is relatively new in the long history of art. Its roots are traced to the early 20th century, when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began assembling pieces such as Still Life with Chair Caning,1912, and Fruit Dish and Glass,1912.
