Artwork Page 4

Artwork

As with many artistic endeavors, Dale jumped into magazine paper collage in 2009 purely on the unquenchable desire to make something out of nothing. For a time she focused on magazine advertising photos of various objects and began to collect clocks, jewelry, neckties and other bits, looking forward to a time when she would assemble them into a picture. But something happened along the way. As she cut out the photos, she started noticing fields of color in the ad backgrounds. Soon her eye was drawn more to the color than the object and so focus shifted and she began to cut around the object, accumulating a store of colorful scraps. Once she had a good variety, she took up scissors, glue stick, and canvas board and created her first magazine paper collage.

There was nothing but her mind's eye to work from and for Dale this was a departure as she has always been an artist who draws on visuals. Able to copy most anything by looking at it, she has depended on a photo or subject sitting for her whether a room or a cat or a bird. A few pieces of art from found objects were done without such visuals but until she began collage, she had ventured cautiously into her mind's eye. She had, however, always envied artists who could draw not on that the eye saw outside but what the mind saw inside.

There were many lessons learned in creating the first piece, primarily the need to layer colors. She also found it amusing to create shrubs from photos of hair, her one departure from working entirely in scraps of color. She quickly decided that if she does use a photo of an object, it cannot be used to depict that object, thus hair may not be used as hair. Beyond the first two collages, however, she has not used any pictures of object having found that color is all she needs.

Along the way Dale discovered that the great Henri Matisse worked in paper collage in his later years, something she found both comforting and inspirational. Only after creating ten magazine paper pieces did she look further and found on the web various artists working in decorative, tissue and rice papers as well as torn magazine bits but none she found kept print entirely absent from the work.

What's next is unknown and this is the joy of the artist: an enduring sense of promise. Just a year ago Dale had no idea she would be collecting old magazines from friends and buying them in thrift stores in order to gather color scraps for her art. Her magazine reading has suffered somewhat as she is now drawn more to color than content and is thrilled when an ad for a cracker has a huge field of green. An amusing footnote is that financial planning magazines have ads with the most color and, predictably, high end magazines have better quality paper.

Magazine Paper Collage

Magazine #5, 2009

Magazine #6, 2009

Magazine #3, 2009

Magazine #8, 2009

Magazine #2, 2009

Magazine #4, 2009

Magazine #7 2009

Magazine #1, 2009

Magazine #10, 2009

Magazine #9, 2009