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Senior year of high school and freshman year of collage I had an intense phase in which I listened obsessively to Dead Kennedys. Part of this phase was also listening to every spin-off and spoken word album by former frontman Jello Biafra. Many of Dead Kennedys' album art, posters and inserts were collages constructed by Winston Smith, who went on to create more art for Biafra's projects and other awesome bands. His most well-known album cover is probably the cover of Green Day's album Insomniac, which is where I first came to appreciate Smith's art and learned of Dead Kennedys' existence. Through this phase Winston Smith became one of my favorite artists and inspired my to try his methods myself. To understand his style, you need to see it. Here are some of my favorites:
Find more of Winston Smith's art here: https://www.winstonsmith.com/artcrimes
WINSTON SMITH'S PROCESS
According to his site: "His technique of cutting out by hand and weaving each individual element to form fantastical, often irreverent dreamscapes has inspired a generation of artists."
In other words, imagine rooting through probably thousands of vintage magazines, cutting out images, and gluing them together, without accidentally cutting off arms or fingers or slicing through and ripping the paper people. If one image was integral to his idea and he ripped it by mistake, I wonder if he made photo copies, kept identical magazines on hand or if in the decades since he began his collage work if source material is getting harder to procure.
Part of my phase while listening to Biafra's side projects adorned with Smith's art was attempting to create my own such collages. What did every collage have but 40s/50s/60s retro advertisements in strange juxtapositions to make some kind of surreal scene or political statement--or both?
Hence, my creations.
MY PROCESS
Like Winston Smith, I used a bunch of retro advertisements and "cut them" out, except I didn't have access to a million vintage magazines and would have felt bad destroying them, so I spent hours combing the internet for suitable subjects, many on Pinterest, and downloaded any that I thought I could work with. Once downloaded, I used a photo editor to painstakingly delete their backgrounds before pasting each image to a google drawing and painstakingly rearranging and scaling them in juxtaposition with other images until I was satisfied. The main difference is I could never find good backdrops to these projects. Whereas many Winston Smith collages are glued to some of plane of existence, mine float in the void.
SCARY FINGERS' COLLAGES
That blurry mound the man is sitting on is a pile of bullet shells. This was before I learned to upscale images before deleting the background. I couldn't bother to go through that painstaking process again, hence the blurriness. Note its similarity in shape to the jello on the TV. I kind of wish I left the background on the jello, so it looked more like an advertisement. The most work went into adding all the guns, suitcases, hats, and liquor onto the pinup calendar in the background.
With my second effort I got really carried away with cramming as many people in a rectangular space as possible. The subtleties of the violence and destruction and goofiness should entertain you for a few minutes at least. There's several plot lines occurring at once if you pay attention to where the people are looking and their proximity to each other.
This one was way faster to bang out. You faint one time, and everybody's in your business. After this masterpiece, my work ethic and aesthetic conviction started falling apart.
UNFINISHED COLLAGES
I named this one after a common phrase in William S. Burroughs' novels. Something to do with that red meat. It's a little crowded and there's some unnecessary blank space, so I'm not as proud of it. I knew it was going nowhere when I spent hours erasing the background around the balloon man with the mustache, only to find with only one foot and some unfinished balloons (since I cut him out of a larger background), there were extremely limited places for him to go. I gave up because it wasn't gelling. Interestingly, I must have tapped into Winston Smith's psyche, because after seeing the drawing of the floating heads in a vintage ad in an antique store and finding it online to use in my collage, I later found Winston Smith already used it in an old Dead Kennedys poster seen below:
I should probably know whose painting this is, but after my old computer died with all my downloaded collage elements, it would be hell to try and find its original source. Instead of using elements from the painting, I thought the guy with the coke, the guy springing in the air, and a plate of pancakes and sausage just looked so good and superimposed on it. Really not much else I could add to it.
As the title suggests, these are leftover images I didn't use in other collages, yet since I had already removed the backgrounds I wanted to use them somewhere, and this was as far as I got.
While I didn't successfully make much out of these, those guys looking up in the sky are still favorites of mine to paste on my computer home screen amid the chaos of album covers and images of my favorite musicians, writers, and actors. If nothing else, this is a great way to show how my better collages started, juxtaposing images that looked like they could be reacting to each other.
I guess it's finished. At this point I just wanted to use that image of the woman with the man dangling like a fish and had to make some excuse for that ending... The only thing this comic is missing is some background. Words aren't necessary.
SCREENSAVER
My computer home screen has been made of collages of my favorite things for years. While my home screen now is a work in progress, this second edition is probably my best.
Hope this inspired you, if not to make your own collage, then to check out some more art by Winston Smith.
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