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One day, my daughter showed me a piece of art that she had made. It looked like a fancy ransom note, with cut-out letters and pictures from magazines. It was a touching get-well card for her sick grandmother. She told me it was the art of collage, a movement that emerged with Cubist artists Braque and Picasso and has been around since 1910. Since then, she has created other pieces that are humorous or emotionally moving and focus on a social cause.
I was fascinated and went online to find other collage artists, as I hadn’t made collages since I was in elementary school and didn’t know that, except for vision boards, this art form was enjoyed by adults. During my research, I also found a whole TikTok community of visual journalists, who create a slightly different kind of collage art in journals and notebooks. Both collage art and visual journaling are great ways to express yourself, tell a story, or reminisce about a fun time in your life.
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Pat Hart dabbled in collage art as a teenager, but it wasn’t until 2000 that she decided to take her craft more seriously. Since then, he joined a group of artists in Tivoli and began showing his collage art at local shows.
“To make my collage art, I cut out images from magazines that speak to me in whatever way they do,” Hart said. “I’m also a speech-language pathologist, so words and phrases inspire me. Years ago, I heard the phrase, ‘entertaining doubts’, and thought ‘what a weird phrase’. How do you entertain something?
Collage art can be created with photographs, images or words from magazines or newspapers, fabric, textured paper, and other types of media.
For Hart’s entertaining piece of doubt, he created an audience with weird expressions who weren’t sure what they were doing. “I had a great time doing it, first I came up with the concept and then the images,” he said. “But there are times when I just see two pieces sitting next to each other and I think I can do something with them.”
Hart also learned the process of dissolving National Geographic magazines to create collage paper. “It’s really fascinating how this process alters the image and makes the paper look textured,” she explained.
He finds collage art therapeutic. “My mind is relaxed and I am creating a story in my head,” she said. “Usually it leads to some kind of insight about myself or about something that happened in my life.”
For example, one of her pieces is titled “Protective Garments” and portrays a well-dressed woman wearing a knight’s helmet. “It’s about acknowledging my own voice and the ways I’ve protected myself from speaking out and being true to myself.”
Hart’s collages can also be inspired by nature and the cosmos, but he says that “it really depends on the mood I’m in.”
Patti Gibbons uses collage art to document a moment or experiences in her life, and sometimes uses a visual journal to remind her of vacations.
“Most of my work is fine art collage and personal narrative, using old images and old paper,” explains Gibbons, a Kingston resident who also designs greeting cards and art cards.
Like Hart, Gibbons also finds creating collage art therapeutic. “I told stories in my early work that were very personal and it was a way for me to process different things in my life,” he said.
For example, Gibbons once created a three-part story dealing with young motherhood and including images of women and children. “I create works in different ways,” she explains. “Usually with collage, I have a theme or an idea and it just clicks. It’s magic. When I do narrative collages, they have to be a little more planned.”
For her visual journals, she writes thoughts or poetry and then paints around her. “My journals are very personal,” she said.
Jamie Grossman is a landscape painter and used sketchbooks to improve her drawing skills and make them stronger and faster. She could then quickly make initial drawings so she could return to painting.
“As I got better at drawing, I realized that my sketchbooks weren’t really interesting and my handwriting was terrible,” he explained.
She learned calligraphy and page layout and then wanted to add elements to tie the writing and the artwork together. However, like many visual journalists, he does not use clippings from magazines or paper.
“For example, I might come back from the zoo with my ticket and want to collage the page, but I don’t really collage,” he said. “Instead my art is painting and using different media with a calligraphy title and some kind of notes, maybe a haiku.”
To her, Grossman describes art journals as meditative. “For a long time I was painting to sell pictures and you end up with a house full of pictures,” she said. “I got to the point where I only wanted to paint what I wanted to paint, so my sketchbooks became a haven to do whatever I wanted with them. You can make a painting or a sketchbook that creates hundreds of pieces that can even tell a whole story. A painting is a moment in time.”
Do you want to learn how to do it?
If you want to create collages or start visual journaling, Gibbons suggests looking at what other people create, but also working on developing your own style. “There are different methods and ways that people work with paper, but to be really original, you have to put in the time and keep working on it.”
Whether he’s working in visual journals or collage art, Gibbons, who belongs to the Kingston Society of Arts Y Mid-Hudson Arts, recommends searching the Internet, especially Facebook and YouTube groups, for resources and online classes. However, if he needs help coming up with something to create, Jamie Grossman provides a list of suggestions for him to get started on his website, HudsonValleySketches.blogspot.com.
Lisa Iannucci is a freelance writer from the Hudson Valley. Contact her at [email protected]