I’m a collage artist. These are the modern (meaning, contemporary) collage artists that I enjoy the most.
– Julien Pacaud (“Negative Numbers”)
This is the man who single-handendly turned me from hating collage, to loving it. When I saw his sci-fi-like works I immediately recognized a certain “narrative” atmosphere. There is always more going on in Pacaud’s depicted surreal worlds than what “a single frame” would let go. Digging deeper, I found that he had studied filmmaking before becoming an illustrator. He’s a master, and very successful in the commercial illustration space.
– Kieron Cropper (“CUR3ES”)
If organized chaos means anything to you, then you will probably like CUR3ES’ works. A feast of colors and shapes, feels alienating at first look, but it’s growing on you fast. He’s my all time favorite visual artist!
– Jesse Treece (“Collage Art by Jesse”)
If there was a genre called “modern old collages”, Jesse Treece would be the king of it. An artists who knows how to properly marry vintage pictures with very new visual ideas.
– Ben Giles (“ben///giles”)
Ben Giles is a 20 year old artist from the UK. He has worked on various styles, but I believe there’s a common feeling coming out of all his works: happiness. His collages are the opposite of what we’d call dark, there’s a certain optimism in his works, a feel-good approach.
– Hugo Barros (“Mesineto”)
Mesineto’s work usually features a central object, which is then cut-up and composed in various ways. Some very interesting ideas emerge from piece to piece. Other times, he goes totally abstract. Mesineto is also known by his alter egos artists, Tareco and Sens.
– Bryan Olson (“Glass Planet”)
If CUR3ES had a twin brother, that would be Glass Planet. King of minimalism. Lovely artworks, very mystifying.
– Laura RedÂburn (“CardboardCities”)
Instead of cutting out whole objects and assembling them into a collage, this artist is usually cutting out textures and patterns, then re-shapes them, and finally uses them into her unique collages.
– Beth Hoeckel (“Beth from Above”)
Beth puts the “point of view” theme into perspective, by making sure that the background is grand and spectacular.
– And two of mine, “Amphitrite” and “Elysian Fields”:
UPDATE: A few more great contemporary collage artists that popped up lately:
– Caroline Alkire (“Child of the mountains”)
– Mariano Peccinetti (“Trasvorder”)
– Flirst
– Leigh Smith (“Cosmic Spread”)
I’ve been working on this mixed-media three-part illustration for a while now (long before I said I won’t do any more John Maus collages). As I struggled with it, it saw many alterations, then I gave up on the project, picked it back up, and (I think) I finally got it somewhat right. It’s my first triptych artwork, I liked the dynamics between the three pictures when I first saw them. The work is based on the very expressive photographs beautifully shot by Stephan CK at a John Maus live show in The Netherlands.
You can download the 3-part high-res artwork in full here (zip, 18 MB). They should print well up to 24″x36″, if you have access to such a big printer. I bet they would look good on a wall (I might print them myself, my husband liked them too).
Click the image below for a somewhat larger view of the combined work:
Or check a detail:
I’m not looking at selling my collages yet, but I did have a look at the various art shop options that exist online. I checked the 5-6 most popular ones and I was shocked that there’s curation for most of them, before they get accepted to their store. They somehow think that they’re galleries instead of shops. I don’t have a problem with curation for gallery-like shops, but when they market their solution as a semi-generic “art shop”, then curation becomes a problem.
To give you an idea of what I mean: art is a bit like fashion sometimes. Various styles come in and out of fashion as time goes by. If you want to see what’s “in” in terms of high art, you check TumblR’s art tag. It measures the “beat” of modern art pretty accurately, both commercial high art, and underground high art. And then of course there’s the collage tag, which is also a popular form of art, and there you can see what kind of collages are popular nowadays.
So what I found out was that the collages on some of these curated art shops are old-style. They don’t reflect the “now” of the art form. Obviously, the people who curated these collages have a concrete idea of what’s “nice”, usually an idea formulated many years ago, and so they pick collages and art that’s simply not that current anymore.
No matter how you put it, crowd-sourcing is the way to go. No matter if you’re Google, Amazon, Twitter, or an art shop, letting democracy decide what’s popular will eventually give you the most accurate results, and better sales. And that’s why I find Society6 to be the best place to sell art prints today. Etsy.com is popular too, but because they also sell other types of stuff, they require all of their artists to send their art prints themselves (this requires artists to buy expensive printers). On Society6 instead, you just upload your file, and they take care of the printing/framing etc as it gets sold. That’s how it should be done, Society6 makes sense, at least for digital artists.
A piece inspired by Theodor Adorno’s and John Maus’ teachings (using Maus as a model).
As colorfully attractive Normality looks at the first sight, it’s a very limited state of mind, resulting in the Death of the person’s intellectual and other progress. On the piece, Society on the left, and Authority on the right, both safely situated on the well-defined terrain, keep the person bound to Normality, masterfully blinding him of all the possibilities on his back, which are as endless as the Universe itself.
Not a great high-art photo-montage, I was just having fun with this one.
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