Presenter: Jordan Smith
Authors: Jordan Smith
Faculty Advisor: Kristy Giles
Institution: Utah Valley University
Can collage work as drawing and painting? This was an idea that somehow intertwined in my personal art exploration and through assignments from class. What is so alluring to me as an artist is that the process of collage marries strangely with the time-consuming process of rendering something in a drawing or painting. Collage is quick, sporadic, and reactionary (at least in my process). This allows an artist to explore and experiment with many different compositions quickly. In my work I like to focus on taking imagery that we are constantly inundated with, be it textures that surround us gathered through charcoal rubbings, advertising imagery, or images from the news, and then deconstructing them and reorganizing them into something new. Hopefully if done right I resonate with a few of these on an intuitive, and intellectual level. The few that I do resonate with are the ones that I like to translate either to drawing or paint. What I find so interesting about this point of the process is trying to imitate the collage in these mediums in an accurate yet expressive manner. There is a challenge in how to represent cardboard, paper, photographs, and the other myriad of materials used in collage in a new purely two dimensional medium. When working on these at some point, the artist needs to ignore the recognizable imagery that comes through when building collage and focus on just color, tone, form, and the other essential elements of design, in order to capture the essence of the collage. This approach has been interesting to work with and I plan on using it more in the future, it is both expressive and analytical, and those two feelings are good to channel when working creatively. It has pitfalls, with being too literal and recognizable with imagery.