collage – Circle Foundation for the Arts

Maryse-Anne Couteau

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Maryse-Anne Couteau is a self-taught French artist. Her preferred medium has long be the pencil and she employs a colored pencil technique not widely used by grown-ups! In recent years, Couteau has been also working in ink.

In her early work, Couteau used very little color with very fine graphics and successfully suggested volume by a black stroke gently underlined in color. Subsequently, color increasingly imposed itself, and eventually supplanted the line. At first, the tones were quite assertive but were gradually refined. By superimposing different colors, the artist creates mixes and nuances, which are one of the characteristics of her work.

Although the human body and face have a great place in her world, Maryse-Anne Couteau is not limited to any particular style or type of representation; staging objects as well as animals and people. The artist finds an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the real world; the fertility of her imagination and her keen sense of observation intermingle a wonderful inner universe and a precise and detailed reality.

In her surprisingly original compositions, we see the impossible desire to get right up close to the subject and reach its very essence. The covering, the sliding, the transparency of surfaces, in reality, opaque, the repetition of shapes at different scales or the modification of angles of view on the same subject testify to a wish to see higher and deeper; to embrace the subject in its totality instead being limited to the superficial; to see further by projecting into the future and the past; to explore beneath the surface of things; go beyond the limit traced by the outlines and reach the infinite riches that hide in every aspect of reality.

After years of studies and a professional life, which was far from artistic, Maryse-Anne Couteau has decided to invest herself entirely in drawing and has devoted herself for nearly thirty years to her passion.

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Mikoazule

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Noelle Correia aka Mikoazule was born in 1977 under a full moon in Scorpio in Fresno, California. After spending time tinkering around at her father's auto repair/welding shop as a child, Noelle began to create an imaginary world out of carpenters chalk drawings of discarded car parts. This world turned the industrial environment of downtown Fresno into a delusional paradise. Noelle left Fresno at eighteen but took her imaginary world with her and continues to process the nuance and grit of everyday cultural collision through fluvial imagery.

Her creative process begins with color. Noelle is inspired by how the color schemes pop in biodiversity, such as a poisonous dart frog's epidermal layers resting on a muted green leaf. The biodiverse thread within her creative practice is that of Botanical Surrealism. She begins her work by thinking about the relationship between emotions and color and allows color theory to drive the outcome. Symbols that represent the feminine mystique and practical magic are a reoccurring thematic backdrop. The process has become a life metaphor in which she works through obstacles, obtains epiphanies, and understands herself as a tiny part of a much larger whole.

She conveys the beauty and complexities of human nature using texture, pattern, and narrative elements throughout her work. Her work has been exhibited in California Galleries and collectives exhibitions, including Radius Gallery, The Art Cave, The Art League of Santa Cruz County, Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery, and Arte Americas. Noelle's work further explores the botanical world through watercolor painting, paper-cut collage practices, and encaustic medium. Through wax, water, and human narratives of all kinds, Noelle creates a vibrant play on color and form.

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Takako Konishi

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African American artist Takako Konishi (pseudonym, 1969) constructs collages that pay homage yet break with the traditional collage aesthetic. He describes his process as painting with images. Utilizing digital technology along with traditional methods he cuts, pastes, blends and mixes imagery, creating multi-layered mash-up compositions that burst with sexuality, anger, beauty and obsession.

“Imagery makes the best paint, it’s comes dripping with color and connotations.” - Takako Konishi

Born and raised in Chicago, Takako has always appreciated existing between different cultures, classes, environments and neighborhoods. He attributes growing up in a large multicultural city as a big factor in what made him appreciate the beauty in the contrast of differences.

Formally trained as an architect (currently practicing in Chicago), Takako was heavily influenced by his time in graduate school at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (2004-2007). The school had a dynamic mixture of disciplines and students interacting within the same building. He fondly recalls attending lectures and critiques on fashion, art, industrial design and architecture. It was during this time Takako became interested in collage.

His first experiments with collage occurred while doing research for his thesis (Culture, Conflict and the Phenomena of Appropriated Space). Here, he employed collage as the underlying framework to organize the thesis document, installations and final proposals. This research proved to be critical in shaping his artistic philosophies.

“The bi product of sub culture generates rich material for art.” - Takako Konishi

Takako’s collage-making process simulates the environments many of us experience daily. We constantly go back and forth between our real environment and our perceived environment as filtered through our devices. His art strives to reside somewhere in between this tension of the simulated and the real.

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Ritva Georgiades

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Berni Stephanus

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Benoît Tremblay

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Multidisciplinary artist, Benoît Tremblay aka Bent was born in Montreal’s Southwest Borough in 1975. An autodidact, he never studied art in an institution and he happily sees himself as an anti-academic artist. His influences are as wide as a 1000 colours you might place on a palette at the same time.

From Pollock to Basquiat, via Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Georg Baselitz or Gil Joseph Wolman and Guy Debord, the painter Bent tries his best to create visual reflections that can disturb life. Since 2004, he has had over 10 solo exhibitions and participated in 7 group art shows. He loves to travel and he sometimes creates work abroad that he finishes in the comfort of his workshop in his garage in Montreal.

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Sheila Eder

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Sheila Eder was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma and raised in Detroit. She has lived in New York City since 1970. After considering a career in music, she earned graduate degrees in psychology, public health and public administration. More recently Ms. Eder has pursued an interest in collage and mixed media, studying at Cooper Union and at the Art Center of the 92nd Street in NYC. Her work has won two "Best in Show" prizes and has been exhibited in New York and Miami, and in many online exhibits.

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Bernd Reichert

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“I was born behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany. I am now living on the surreal shores of Belgium. I studied printmaking in Germany (Berlin, Magdeburg) and Ireland. After many years of producing limited edition prints in all forms, I stopped for a few years my art production and traveled the world extensively. Now I have moved my area of interest to collages and paintings. I like to see myself as a kind of surrealist artist in the tradition of Leonor Fini, Eileen Agar and the likes.

My collages are a juxtaposition of elements, images, and objects incoherent to each other, thereby exercising a de-contextualizing form of violence on language and image alike. They contain a kind of strangeness, a disturbing element disquieting the spectator/reader who is confronted with a series of elements taken from one's everyday life which, being put one next to each other, provoke, suddenly, an incoherent situation, a source of obscurity and vagueness. Working with text and images, I like to encourage the viewer to oscillate between reading and looking. It is about reusing, recycling and re-contextualizing the over-abundance of images and information we can choose from Time, the various cultural influences of the placed I traveled to and a Babel-like plethora of different languages are recurring aspects of my work.

The artwork is telling stories, influenced by my travels, but also often containing autobiographical elements."

Select Solo Exhibitions

Gallery Kaire-Desine, Vilnius (LT), 2005

Gallery Meno, Cultural Centre Jonava (LT) , 2005

Musée de l’Art Spontané, Brussels (BE), 2008

Gallery 89, London (UK), 2010

Kunstwerkstatt, Magdeburg (GE), 2010 and 2013

Gallery ORT, Birmingham (UK), 2012

Cultural Centre, Minden (GE), 2014

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Fay Wood

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“Art using found objects has attracted me since 1965, when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and saw large sculptures by local artists made from detritus on the Bay shore. They were fantastic, noisy, beautiful works with great humor and form - I never have forgotten them. As an art student at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Mass. I began studying painting, but later, when I was attending a life drawing group, a sculptor encouraged me to carve directly in wood. This began what has become a deep love for sculpture and, later found object assemblage.

In 1992, when I finally had a permanent studio in the Hudson Valley of New York State, I began combining found objects with the cherry wood carvings I had been doing and continue to do so; adding found rag paper, wire, and paint to the mix.

I have also continued to paint, draw, and create tapestries and, recently I have completed an 18 piece portfolio of collages. I have an extensive exhibition history, including The Proskauer prize from the National Sculpture Society, exhibitions at Brookgreen Gardens, S. Carolina, Biennale Dell Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy, where I have been invited again in 2019, as well as many solo, group and invitational exhibitions in the USA. I will also be a featured artist with Artrepreneur, a website assisting artists to further their careers, in a film on PBS worldwide in April 2019.”

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Jaco Putker

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Jaco Putker is a contemporary artist and printmaker from The Hague, The Netherlands. He combines digital and traditional techniques to produce images that are both playful and sinister, nostalgic and magical.

His preferred medium is photopolymer, or solar plate, etching. This technique is a non-toxic way of etching which allows for photorealistic depictions. Rather than impose a meaning to his work, Jaco Putker invites the viewers to associate freely and give his etchings personal significance through individual perceptions and filters.

The titles of the etchings are non-descriptive and give no handle as to the meaning of the works. The artist considers his works to be illustrations to fables that don't exist but hopefully take shape in the viewers' minds.

Jaco Putker was awarded the Dutch national Business Art Service competition for Graphic Arts in 2010. He won the Awagami Paper Factory Prize (at the Awagami International Miniature Print Exhibition) twice; in 2015, and again in 2017. In 2017 he won the ON PAPER International Printmaking Award 2017.

His work has been exhibited throughout Europe, as well as in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Australia, Argentina, Canada and the USA.

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Maryse-Anne Couteau

"Anything could inspire me but I am very fond of mixing the representation of human beings with complex constructions in an imaginary world.”

Mikoazule

"Through watercolor, nuanced narratives, beeswax, plant magic and paper-cuts, I respond to human metamorphosis and the many rivers forged through close encounters of the unusual kind. I'm interested in visually documenting the nuanced human narrative as seen from the individual cosmic biosphere."

Takako Konishi

Takako Konishi constructs collages that break with the traditional collage aesthetic. He describes his process as painting with images. Utilizing digital technology he cuts, blends and mixes imagery, creating multilayered mash-up compositions that burst with sexuality, anger and obsession.

Ritva Georgiades

"I mainly work in mixed media collage and enjoy experimenting with different materials. My art is an ongoing journey and is one where I can use my inner thoughts to create images either in realism, or abstract form, and I find great inner peace from creating."

Berni Stephanus

"I make one collage every day. I chose collage in 1967 in order to express myself about the outer and my inner world and stopped painting in 2000 after a period of collaged paintings. I also create in-camera double exposures."

Benoît Tremblay

"As a self-taught artist, I do still concentrate on studying the postwar artistic avant-garde as well as the political and social life that surrounds us. For me, abstract art doesn't mean that it is abstracted by our day by day living, but that it goes beyond to reach a biggest dream."

Sheila Eder

“Art is not what you see but what you make others see.” - Edgar Degas

Bernd Reichert

Fay Wood

“I’m inspired by the materials I work with (usually found objects); the touch, feel and intensity of them. The pleasure of working with a beautiful piece of wood, the visual impact of applied color, and the textures of fabrics; how I can imagine the ways to use them is intensely moving.”

Jaco Putker

Jaco Putker composes vivid, fantastical scenes reminiscent of strange dreams that transcend the boundaries between magical and dangerous, nostalgic and futuristic.