On Friday 26th October, Ken led the members into making collage pictures.
He began by saying, 'The art of collage goes back into the beginning of paper making by the Chinese before the Egyptians,3000 BC or even earlier; it is not a modern art form. Collage comes from the French "colle" - glue or "coller " to glue and that is what we
shall be doing tonight.' He then referred to two books that had been an inspiration to him, "Collage , colour and texture painting " by Mike Bernard and Robin Capon and a more definitive source ,"Creative collage techniques. He exemplified
the use of some of their suggestions by showing some of his own creations. A painting of Dresden, which had sold at one of our exhibitions and a transcription of a Monet using coloured tissue paper to create the stratification of the cliffs at Etretat and then adding acrylic and inks.He suggested preparing a sketch book for holidays with random shapes of paper stuck to the pages and using cafe receipts as a background and showed examples of both. Similarly he showed how a still life could be begun with random shapes stuck on to the paper. He also had part of his course work with local artist Brian Taylor using tissue paper to create trees in a landscape painting before adding colour and then putting more PVA glue on the dried painting to give a gloss,bringing out the colour. Frank Bingley and he had been to a workshop by Daniella Vaughan who makes collage using coloured magazine pages but torn, not cut.
Frank showed his
'Seagull painting' and Ken, ' a Robin'. After another session with Daniella, Ken had created a political portrait of Donald Trump beginning with a background of newsprint of articles about him. To get members started Ken suggested they might try making a towns-cape and showed Julian Trevelyan's painting. They might prefer to use their own ideas and subjects using newspaper or magazine coloured pictures. And off everyone went and 'Wow' what pictures they created!
