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.
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fig1.
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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’.
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Second stage
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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!
