Rip Up Your LP's!

Back in the early 1960's, like most other teenagers, I quickly developed an interest pop music played on the radio. I would listen to Radio Luxembourg which was one of the few radio stations that played non-stop pop music of the day, even though the signal would fade in and out significantly. One of the bands (we used to call them groups back then) that I really liked was The Beatles. I was a bit young for the very early stuff and came in on their second album With The Beatles. At that time, I’d just started a Saturday job in a grocery shop and saved up enough money to buy a record player and this set me off visiting record shops in the nearby town of Market Harborough. After buying a number of singles (first of which was Chris Montez’s Let’s Dance) I eventually bought my first LP, which was entitled With The Beatles. I thought then (and still do now) that this was the best band in the world! I played the album over and over, much to the annoyance of my parents! Some time later, I lent it to a friend, along with a couple of other albums, which he (unknown to me) lent them on to someone else. Needless to say, I never saw any of them again. A year or two back, the same album came out on CD in a cardboard sleeve, which I bought and now everything is right with my music world again!

My creativity here sees me recreating that album cover using ripped and cut magazine pages stuck onto board with PVA glue. It’s a technique I learned from Danielle Vaughn (of Sky Portrait Artist of the Year fame) but is only the second foray into this type of work. If any of you have looked at my website, you’ll have seen a Common Gull, which was my first attempt.

fig1.

 It was started in a workshop with a number of fellow artists, in which we had less than three hours, including setting up and clearing up afterwards. Whilst a number of our group roughly finished their work, mine was too intricate a task to complete in this time – see fig1. Another session at home saw significantly more added but nothing like a good likeness. The final session saw improvement in the faces but still not the best likeness, and here it will have to stop.

As our tutor mentioned, that with ripped paper work it’s easier to start with a large board than fiddle around with tiny slithers of paper – this I found to my peril, it’s nigh impossible to handle small pieces when there’s glue on them! For some very small pieces I resorted to using scissors and tweezers, with certain facial features built up separately, then glued to the main body of work ‘en masse’.

Second stage

Creating pictures using this medium is very addictive, and I guarantee that you will never look at a magazine again without see colours and patterns and thinking how gorgeous bits of this and that would look in a ripped paper picture!