Interlaken - Collage Painting - 2009
Julia Hensley
Being an artist means welcoming destruction. The only way that many artists I know can create freely is to set aside the fear that comes from destroying something precious. It’s a bit ironic that creative magic may only happen after something seemingly special has been laid to waist.
It’s also true that the debris of destruction can create another kind of magic. I’m often left with scraps of paper when I judiciously rip off a section of a painting on paper in order to make a compositional correction. Those reject pieces often find a new life in a collage. While it would be nice to claim this unique process as my very own it’s far from the truth.
The first known collage was created by one of two guys with familiar names, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who started using collage elements when they were putting together the concepts of Cubism. Oddly enough there is still an ongoing debate about which of these guys first glued a piece of material onto a painting or drawing. Since then collage has gone on to be used by everyone from Matisse to Koons, with all matter of materials, sometimes blurring the line between collage and sculpture.
Julia Hensley is a Seattle artist whose collages have always intrigued me for their simple yet complex colors and compositions. When I first met Julia she was creating collages of cityscapes that she then put into oil paint. More recently she has embraced collage whole heartedly. Check out her website for more samples of her work, including a journal post about This Storied Heart, an installation collage that was shown at the Form-Space-Light Gallery in Fremont last summer. The colors and emotion contained in her current series of collages represent a love affair with paper and paint.
In my next post I'll share with you another local artist who works in both paint and collage.
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