Artists Working in the Cut and Paste Technique

Keiji Ito

Tokyo-born Keiji Ito now teaches at Kyoto University and has made a name for himself in Japan as a creator of intricate collages for album and book covers, advertising and magazine illustration. His signature style is multi-figure compositions, a combination of color and black and white details and colors that were commonly used in old typography. Ito loves making scenes of people and placing them in an unreal landscape assembled from pieces of paper.

Liam Crockard

Canadian Liam Crockard, a recent graduate of an art school in Ontario, fell in love with the collage technique during a video editing class. In his work, he uses paper and wood, various printing techniques on matte paper and ink, creating composition through smudges and tears. In an interview Crockard admits that he is impressed by collages from the 60s and 70s and draws all his inspiration from old periodicals, clippings from which his personal archive is overflowing.

Ava Lake

New York native Eva Lake began making collages at an early age, at her mother’s gallery in the early 60s. The influence of the images of those years is strongly felt in Eva’s collages – graphic, simple, using bright colors and recognizable photographic images. The protagonist of her collages is a woman who has been copied from a celebrity (from Liza Minnelli to Marilyn Monroe) or stolen from the cover of a vintage magazine. Inspired by the Dadaists and Rauschenberg, Lake makes simple, eye-catching works exploiting female pop culture imagery, and she herself calls her collages nothing less than “art to steal.”

Luis Dourado

The young Portuguese Louis Dourado trained as an industrial designer in Porto before going to Barcelona for an internship. It was then that he chose collage as the main form for his work. Dourado’s collages have been published in German and American magazines, while the designer himself is still searching for his own style, working with distorted objects, old photographs, portraits of famous people and symbols of bygone eras.

Brian Wu

American photographer Brian Vu runs a great blog about the art around him and in his spare time from photography and editing makes minimalist collages with mystical undertones. Brian is inspired by ancient history, the Middle East, and the music of the California coast and is currently finishing his college degree in interactive media design.

Sam Lubitz

Los Angeles-based designer Sam Lubicz hasn’t graduated yet, but he’s already caught the eye of photo editors at American magazines. His bold, chaotic work with lots of colorful details stands out from what is usually seen on the pages of magazines. When Sam first came up with his collages, he emptied his family’s archives of old photos and magazines, and for his next series, he began looking for inspiration at garage sales and book fairs.

Tashiko Okanue

Tashiko Okanoue, a mid-20th century Japanese artist who made amazing collages from clippings of Vogue and Life, was undeservedly forgotten and only rediscovered in the early 2000s. Her work, inspired by Max Ernst’s experiments with mid-century Japanese fashion houses, is included in the history of Japanese photography and has been exhibited several times in recent years. Okanue’s monochrome collages show girls dressed in couture juxtaposed with calling out bombs, palace interiors, birds and animals.

Melinda Gibson

Melinda Gibson is 25 years old and currently based in London. Having assisted Martin Parr and Wolfgang Tillmans, she graduated with an MA from the College of Communication in photography, but decided to focus on collage. Never parting with her camera since childhood, she found a way to add a very special touch to her own photographs: replacing human figures with parts of landscapes and interiors, which she also shot herself.