- Ray Monde
Lost or heading in the right direction?
If you’re an artist or writer or musician or anyone who dabbles in creative pursuits, you’ll be very familiar with the bouts of self-doubt. Especially in the early stages of any new work. My collage has been evolving dramatically over the last few years. Early stages involved making work out of existing images from magazines – umbrellas, telephones, screaming mouths.
Then I moved to creating images out of block colours from magazines, like using the greys of a Cartier advertisement to create the grey skies over Aarhus, Denmark.
While I absolutely love this, I feel there’s always a battle going on, with each little piece of paper, thousands of them in a single piece of work, battling its neighbour for attention.
I liked that you could lose yourself in this barrage, but increasingly I’m trying to simplify it. By simplifying, I hope to draw more attention to the collage rather than the background.
That’s why I’m endeavouring a series with solid block colours in the background, dramatic pastels that will form the stage for the collage to be the hero.
Two-and-a-half works into a 10 work series and I am still unsure. Is it too graphic? Is it too plain? Is there any understanding of the meaning of the work.
I’ve just completed, Rape Fields, above. Part of the series titled “Dark side of the Road.” And here’s a work in progress, as yet untitled, it’s a Hawthorn bush on Bombay Road.
I know the only way to know if I’m headed in the right direction is to keep moving ahead. Maybe around the next bend, I’ll know if this is the right route.
