Nature re-imagined in mixed media collage
The term 'collage' comes from the French word coller meaning “to glue” and was coined at the beginning of the 20th century by Cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Collage artwork existed long before there was a modern term to describe it; t has been used by a wide range of artists because of its capacity for abstraction and interpretative potential. When artists combine disparate elements to form a collage, they create new meaning. They turn familiar things into new, bizarre, and irrational forms.
Collage is a form of visual art in which visual elements are combined to create a new image that conveys a message or idea.
For me, the beauty of collage is its flexibility. I can experiment using different media such as paint, oil pastel, ink, markers and digital media.
I like to use simple techniques such as tearing up hand painted papers and pasting images over one another. I apply coloured surfaces with ripped edges or straight edges and then combine the techniques of collage and impasto with conventional painting and drawing to produce a form of abstract expressionism.
I find when painted images are ripped, when different textures are assembled together and when ideas collide, something exciting happens and this is what inspires me the most.
