Creativity with Collage

With the holidays over it was back to work for me today which is good because I love my job. It seems to be the holidays that I have the problem with - I always overestimate the amount of artistic work that I intend to do and then feel guilty when it doesn't happen. Anyway I shouldn't beat myself up too much; the days when I can sit and feel the grass between my toes are very few and so deserve to be savoured.

My embroidery work is moving along, just incredibly slowly, partly due to my brain being in holiday mode and partly because this is the nature of it. So I felt the urge to undertake something a bit more immediate, where I could see some results and shake myself up a bit: collage was the answer. It's a great way to work, using images from my files, to give myself the beginning of a new series of work.

Of  the artists that use the collage technique my favourites at the moment have to be Lauren Child, Peter Blake and Blaise Drummond.

Lauren's work is used to illustrate her children's books which is fitting as it's usually as children that we first try out collage for ourselves. An ability to connect with the childlike aspect of our personalities is vital to creativity - to a child, anything is possible.


What Are You Like by Lauren Child

 

At the moment I'm preoccupied with the notion of home. We all want a place we can call home, a refuge we know we can always return to. I've been in my current home for two years now and I'm gradually shaping it in my style, adding pieces and making plans, considering what pictures to put on my walls. So I collaged a series of interior works. They are interiors that appealed to me, peopled with images that I felt drawn to. I didn't think too much about it, but instead worked fast and intuitively so that the work I produced is honest and spontaneous. Here are a few examples:-

 

It's incredibly liberating to work like this. My embroideries require a much slower process, from the sketching out of the initial work to the actual hand-stitched piece itself. Hopefully I will have something to show very soon but for now I'm very happy with my collages which may well form the basis for future work.

Amanda x