Description

The class fee is $55, the materials fee is $8.

Adults Ages 15 and up.

Join Melinda Wheeler on Tuesday, November 9 from 6-8 p.m. to explore the fun and spontaneous world of collage! No prior skills or training are required. “Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric, and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface. The term collage derives from the French term papiers collés (or découpage), used to describe techniques of pasting paper cut-outs onto various surfaces. It was first used as an artists’ technique in the early twentieth century.” 

You will create two finished abstract collages using magazines, greeting cards, old wrapping papers, paints, markers, glue scissors. The collages will each be 5x7. All materials are provided but please feel free to your own magazine, cards, decorations, and scissors. Scissors need to be sharp. 

Melinda Wheeler is a local photographer who has lived in the area for over two decades and enjoyed the art scene and seeing the work of the many talented artists who live here. When the pandemic severely limited travel, she decided to get serious about collage, something she had always been attracted to. This led to learning how to use a “Gelli Plate” for making hand-painted paper with acrylic paint, and to cutting out pieces of her photos to use with the papers. She also uses text from old letters and has developed an appreciation for the beauty of canceled stamps. Her years in photography have helped her sense of how to compose, but she found that a collage composition could be very diverse from that of a photo and that she could control it more closely. Wheeler says, “It has been a wonderful learning process and there is always something new to learn.”