Thursday, February 21, 2008

Drawing workshop - collage

Text says "A midday donkey spits out a whole cloth full of plague and parlour art"


Text says "Put your head through the curtains What can you s e e The universe bends a n d space curves boundless expanding not expanding galaxies rushing queerer queerer than we"


Text says " 'Well', he says well thats fine" "Island citizens full of plastic memory ... ... ... ... ... ... listen."

Last week, after we all shared our self portraits and talked through them (and discussed what we'd learnt) and our collages of the portraits, we did a day long session on collages, looking at everything from Dadaism to contemporary illustrators who use collage. We watched a documentary about William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch using a cut up technique where he would chop paragraphs up and then re-join them randomly to make up surreal storylines.

So we were given three different pages of text from different sources, asked to make up a text collage (using any method we wanted), and then do a picture collage from magazine cutouts to illustrate our piece of text (and encouraged to be as surreal as possible!). Most people chopped up their texts in to sentences and then re-arranged them to make some fantastical narratives ... I took a bit of a sidewards route in that I tried to keep the text connected (in sequence, and physically by cutting then out all connected), and went for short, and bit poetry-like, sentences, rather than whole paragraphs, as everyone else was doing. I think I'm the only one who has also stuck the words down as part of the collages ... its all due in this morning, so we'll see. What you see above are my three finished pieces. I'm not even going to try and explain them!

As homework we also had to do some drawings based on these collages - but using drawing exercises such as left handed and continuous-line. Below are my strange looking attempts:

Left handed

Blind (ie not looking at the drawing)

Continuous line

Left handed

And my favourite, continuous line.

I really like how the continuous line text has come out ... want to use this effect in the future ... strange things you learn from doing a collage project!

5 comments:

Zara said...

These are brilliant! I especially like the cat and the curtains. Have you ever seen Tom Phillips' "A Humument"? I think you might like it, your stuff reminded me of it a bit, he used a similar technique but throughout an entire book - http://www.humument.com .

Carole said...

I really like what you did with the text. It lends itself very well to surrealism. These are so interesting. I also like the line drawings. Your course seems to be very well structured!

Anonymous said...

Hi Mithi, the text in your cat/curtains piece reminded me of a talk by Richard Dawkins, postulating that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. Very cool!

mrana said...

wow, i LOVE all your latest projects, portraits and collages! They look like so much fun and the results are amazing, I am in awe and inspired. As soon as I get properly settled in (within the next few months I hope) I am going to have to experiment ... :)

Gesa said...

This is fascinating - I love the idea. I've been using a bit of collage recently, but mostly very organically: integrating it rather thoroughly into mixed media drawings. But these are great, and get me thinking a bit more about 'collage-collage'