Found Art
This is a photo I took in Italy last fall. Rome was especially great for finding the weathered remains of posters peeling off rough stone walls, forming all kinds of new compositions. Found art at its finest. (I'm sure people were wondering WHAT I was photographing!!) I am especially attracted to the layering and the relatively unscathed row of graphic black dots across the top.
Most of what I use in my collages comes from the negative or background spaces in photos. I like to be sure that any image I use in my collage artwork is not clearly from a specific source -- so I am usually working with abstract parts from a larger image. In addition to bins of ripped out imagery, I keep a stash of magazines that I flip through over and over to find the next "right" piece. The one in the photo is so ripped up that several different layers of pages are now revealed. If you crop it in your mind's eye, the upper right quarter of the page (and layers behind) could be a found collage of sorts. It's always fun to see the layering that is created by the remaining parts of magazines. (Sort of like an altered book...) When they have little left to offer, the magazines sadly go into the recycling bin. Flipping through the lacy remnants one last time, I can usually recall the visual elements they have donated to multiple projects!