The collage workshop brought me back to my art classes in high school, middle school, and elementary school. The collage I created in class on Monday was not my first but was by far my most deliberate. Studying collage has given me a new outlook on what goes into making a collage, and what should ultimately come out. I think that my experiences with collages throughout the years follow an interesting trend. That is, my collages have become increasingly sophisticated. When I was in elementary school making a collage in art was a dream come true. I didn’t have to get marker all over my hands, or try to draw a good picture. Instead, I cut out scraps of paper, crinkled up pieces of tissue paper, curled up some colorful pipe cleaners and mindlessly glued these objects to a piece of paper. Of course, I never neglected to cover the entire page with glitter when I was finished.
As I graduated to middle school and high school my ideas began to manifest themselves in my collages, but my juxtaposition was nothing to write home about. In 10th grade, I created a collage of newspaper articles and pictures regarding 9/11. Our prompt for the project was to create something, in memoriam of 9/11. My collage integrated many powerful pictures and certainly accomplished the goal of the assignment. However, my placement of images on the page followed no particular pattern and was far from deliberate. Inspired by Max Ernst’s seamless collages in Une Semaine de Bonte, I took to collage once more this past Monday. For the first time in my life I created a collage with deliberate selection of the images and their placement on the page. The components of my collage combined into a single scene, and while my scene was not nearly as seamless as one made by Ernst, I attempted to tell a story with my placement of pictures. My juxtaposition was deliberate rather than haphazard, and my message was likely much more clear. This course has taught me a lot about art history, but I am also learning a great deal about myself as an artist. I once thought I could only become better at art if I practiced and practiced. While that may be the case for my execution, I think the commentary in my art can be improved upon without even picking up a pencil, or a pair of scissors. For example, as my story about my progression of collaging suggests, simply learning about Ernst allowed me to improve. Such phenomena remind me of the value of a liberal arts education. Indeed, what I learned in the classroom made my art better. In fact, much of what I learn in seemingly unrelated classes has proven to have fascinating connections.
