provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
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March 12, 2007
A Blog on Collage
Preparing to give a collage workshop at the end of the month, I went out to Elizabeth, NJ, to Ikea, to buy $2 picture frames for one of my projects.
We meet collages every day, but do we perceive them as such? Any collection of stratified effluvia is a collage, like the scruff in the weed-fields out the window of the bus, with their impression of purple against dun, like heather on a moor. A collage is a superimposition of disparate objects or impressions, perceived all-at-once. It may be homogeneous, like the ripped layers of ads that scale a billboard. Or it may be heterogeneous, a collection of incongruities – like a violent scene filmed atop the most tranquil music.
A chorus is like a collage, as is a chord. In fact every successive moment of a symphony is a kind of collage, but not the symphony itself. A moment at rush hour in Grand Central is a sound-collage. But most collages are visual, like an envelope pasted with stickers, stamps, tape, words. Or a suitcase clad in decals, tags, markers of identification. Scrapbooks are collages, as are bulletin boards. The boxcars that lie out in the Jersey fields are a collage of red, yellow, green orange, and white geometries, like stacked Rubik cubes. These industrial yards of electronics, which look so much like giant circuit boards, are collaged with splashes of patinaed ponds of gummy green. Scaffolds of bridgework are pasted against a scudded sky, a collage of iron Xs: cross-outs, cancellations, kisses.
With plenty of 5x7” picture frames in my backpack, I boarded the crowded Red-Grooms-collageish subway at Port Authority. My thoughts were and still are mostly on Moby-Dick; however, they were distracted by an entrancing month-old baby next to me. Since thoughts (being linear) cannot be collaged (at least by the average person), I momentarily forgot about the white whale and asked what the infant’s name was. Wouldn’t you know? It was Ishmael.
My sister Kathryn, a literature professor at the University of Miami (18th and 19th century literature), sent me a paper on Moby-Dick that she’d written at Yale. It’s full of breathtaking insights; I’ll share it here, next time, with my fellow Melvillephilians.
Posted by Jane on March 12, 2007 3:49 PM
