Montage: Research

When I think of Montage (and collage for that matter), I immediately think of those popular in the 60s; to name the main ones David Hockney, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton. So I will use this post now to discuss how I feel about the work of these artists, before moving onto this day and an age and the sorts things people are doing with digital montage these days.

David Hockney:

After spending most of the 60s and 70s painting his famous scenes of people splashing about in LA, and pictures exploring his personal friendships at the time, in the 80s he focussed more on the collage. He had always used photographs to copy from when painting/drawing, but with his collages he was now using his camera as part of the process to address the limitations of both painting (in its reliance on subjective, psychological ways of seeing) and photography itself (as he claimed it only really gave a geometric view of the world) (1). In short, his collage work was a way of seeing things from different perspectives all at the same time.

Pearblossom Highway (1986).
Hockney views collages such as this as- not photography- but drawing:  "Because there is no single way to join them. If you make a decision about something like that, isn’t that exactly what you are doing when you are drawing?"

Something to note here- from what was evidently the pre-photoshop days- is that he is taking pictures of the same scenes (for 8 days in the above example (2)), meaning he does not need to cut anything as people are prone to do in collage up until this point, and as aim to do in my digital montage. This is quite a natural way of of working and achieving the right tones within the gamut of colours, but obviously a lengthy one.

Place Furstenberg Paris (1985)
This is what I meant. It seems more than just taking pictures around the same area and placing them together.  The act itself almost creates its own new texture in the road spaces. This reminds me of the patternisation when using the clone tool in photoshop, for although we are going for a smooth clone, sometimes its nice to leave it looking rough for artistic effect.

Peter Blake

Best known for his collage for The Beatles's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (1967), Blake's work combined characters and scenes from folklore and literature with fine art strokes. His collage is more traditional, involving cutting and sticking pictures and "found" materials and arranging them in his own style, unlike Hockney's own photographs of one particular scene.

Blake's most famous work: The Beatle's Sgt Pepper.... album cover. Work such as this cemented Blake as true component of the Pop Art movement. Since I have collected many
 pictures from my family's history, I reckon my own montage will be more like this with obvious digital enhancements. Basically, a multitude of images arranged in different ways.

The Convention of Comic Book Characters, 2012.

And he's still working today.

Jack Lloyd

Been a fan of this guy for a while now; ever since I happened across his gallery and shop in Chorlton Manchester. Indeed, during the same time as I was working on my montage this time last year, I drew inspiration from Jack, and his work, which is based around areas of local significance. The ironic thing is, some of the places he uses in his work don't seem all that significant to those who witness them every day of their lives, but his use of colour and the way he arranges his images (for he photographs everything himself) allows us to see them in new light, and after all, what is art for, but to paint the everyday in new ans exciting ways?  

Lloyd's is the type of work that I aspire to: good to look at and commercially successful. It is also the type of work that I often think "oh, that's done in photoshop, I could do that", whilst at the same time being completely aware that this is his own style and I wouldn't know where to start copying it.

Manchester One.
This one is on the Saatchi Gallery website, but not for sale. It comes as no surprise that Lloyd's work has been accepted to the site. I'm always amazed at the vibrancy of clours. I've no idea how they appear so vibrant. On his website, he catalogues his work according to place name, but inside this he depicts different areas, such as Chin Town above. Very conceptual.

1)   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-features/8782275/The-many-layers-of-David-Hockney.html
2)   http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/place-lancashire/plain/A520840