A Collage Story

It was ten years ago

The wall was in a French bakery that provided “banettes” to restaurants and hotels, yet close enough to its neighborhood to allow the local school children to exhibit their art work on that wall.

As it happened I had just moved in an apartment with a balcony looking over four lush rear yards, countless balconies with umbrellas, cloth lines, seats and tables, bikes, flower pots, etc. … all potential subjects for colored paper collages.

The idea of putting up collages on that wall grew until I approached the owner’s wife with the idea of putting a temporary exhibition of collages in the shape of an arch on the upper part of the wall where the children’s art was exhibited … she agreed and we named it “The Rainbow Show”!

Illustrates the installation of the collages
The rainbow show

 

The Rainbow Show

That was the title of the show from which I have selected a few collages, combined to others, with their descriptive captions and grouped into three thematic sets as follows:

 

Collage compositions based on the classic rainbow colours

illustrates a simple formal pattern of the rainbow colours in the collages
not a shower curtain

 

illustrating a dynamic formal pattern using the rainbow colours
red balcony seat

 

first exploded formal pattern using the rainbow colours
Al Supremo

 

Collage compositions inspired by the style of known painters

 

In the style of Paul-Émile Borduas

formal pattern inspired by Borduas famous black and white pantings
Pour Borduas

 

In the style of Pierre Soulages

 formal pattern using black and dark elements
Soulagements

 

In the style of Tom Wesselman

A humorous take on Wesselman's flat treatment of three dimensional subjects
The great American cereal bowl

 

Original collage compositions:

First controlled geometric formal pattern using the rainbow colours
I the blue square

 

tilted formal composition to illustrate a fall
Blue Fall

 

Going all out to visually suggest the scent of lilacs filling the air
The scent of urban lilac

 

End words

That was ten years ago; produced well before my two previous Cultural Daily posts dealing with collages: the “wizardy of odds” and “imagining out of chance association”.

This post seems, when compared to them, to be more visually fancyful and spontaneous, as if using the rainbow colours gave them a playful creative freshness the most recent posts could not muster, in spite of their own studied qualities.

 

 

Credit all collages to Maurice Amiel

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