The Easiest Way to Become an Artist
Isn’t with Goddamn Artificial Intelligence
Spend enough time on the internet, and an acolyte of artificial intelligence will tell you the technology is “democratizing art.”
I am not sure this is true. And even if it is, AI didn’t need to democratize art in the first place. Democracy in art was already at your fingertips in the form of paper, scissors, and glue.
The easiest way to become an artist is to make a collage.
What is an Artist?
What does it mean to be an artist? Here is my simple equation: artist = art over time. To be an artist, you must make and keep making art.
What is art, then? I don’t fucking know. Outside of denying AI-generated slop the designation, I’m not particularly interested in the question. I suspect it’s unanswerable, or has a moving target for an answer. Some people don’t think readymades are art,1 yet students will still learn about Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain in their art history survey course. Maybe that means students will read about your six-fingered Midjourney abomination one day. I don’t know. But like differentiating design from art, I’m not sure the question is useful or interesting.2
What is interesting is the making. The “verb, not the noun,”
says. And for my money, the easiest way to get making is with collage.
Related Reading
Collage and Drawing
Collage is the easiest way to become an artist because making one requires only paper, glue, scissors, and zero technical ability.
From a materials perspective, drawing is easier. It only requires paper and pencil. But there is a deep, cultural baggage associated with drawing. How many times have you heard, or said yourself, “I can’t draw”? You are not alone. I create things for a living, and I have said the same thing. It’s a perfectionism driven by fear.
There is immense value to drawing, and even—maybe especially—drawing badly. If you let it, drawing can be about seeing, not about being good. You see the world better even when you make a bad drawing of it. You should draw. But I understand it takes a lot of work to combat these internal and cultural associations of “good” or “bad.”
Instead, I want to offer you an entrée into the world of art making with a lower barrier to entry.
The Perfect Art Form for the 21st Century
Collage is the perfect art form for the 21st century because in a time when so much art has already been made, the medium highlights a central tenet of art making: nothing is wholly new and all art is made from what came before it. It is a medium that does not seek to obfuscate the parts that create its whole—it celebrates this assemblage en route to new meaning and insight.
Collage is an exercise in looking at what is before you and seeing what it could be through the magic of juxtaposition. One of my favorite practices is to replace a human figure’s head with something else—a camera, for instance, or maybe an animal head. In this way, collage is the fastest way to illustrate the surreal and fantastical. Collage can be simple, complex, abstract, representational, digital, or analog.3
But lest you think I am not describing “serious” artwork here, collage need not be fast, or even easy. Take, for instance, the work of Romare Bearden, whose piece The Block takes up an entire wall at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and is as vibrant, detailed, and complicated as the Harlem neighborhood it depicts.
Or see the work of contemporary artist Lola Dupre, who creates stunning and unnerving collage by printing multiple copies of the same image, slicing them into narrow strips, and skillfully recombining them to expand, bloat, and duplicate aspects of what is represented.
No easier, but far simpler, is the work of Katrien De Blauwer, who calls herself a “photographer without a camera.” De Blauwer’s work is an exercise of rigorous curation in which she juxtaposes just a few pieces of found imagery to create moody, cinematic compositions.
In collage, there is room for these masters as well as you and me.
How to Begin
There are as many ways to make a collage as there are people who make them. How would you like to begin? Many, including myself, like to cut and paste material from magazines both vintage and contemporary. I use an x-acto knife or a pair of small scissors. You can use old books, digital images and Photoshop, scraps of colored paper, or even the ephemera from your daily life.
One of my favorite techniques for beginning collage artists is to cut up a newspaper and make new “stories” in a sketchbook. Newsprint is ephemeral and does not lend itself well to precision cutting, making it the perfect material for art making unconcerned with perfection.
You might also begin with a head replacement surgery or some other extremely simple approach. How many pieces does it take to make something interesting?
While I do make and enjoy digital collage, I recommend beginning with something analog. The tactility is satisfying; the limitations breed ingenuity. Serendipity abounds.
“Easiest” isn’t Easy
Collage is the easiest way to become an artist, but it is not necessarily easy to be an artist of any variety. Or to get paid for your art once you are one. “The arts are not a way to make a living,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in A Man Without A Country. The world often does not feel set up for artists to thrive.
But whether or not there is money to be made, and no matter what you do to pay the bills, I believe it is worthwhile to make art. To play. Especially in a world increasingly crafted by tech bros that, for some reason, seem to want to remove humans from the art equation.
Over my dead fucking body.
Vonnegut, again: “[The arts] are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
If you’d like to make your soul grow, but don’t know where to start, I recommend making a collage.
Recommendations
I’d like to leave you with some more recommendations. I subscribe to a few collage-based Substack newsletters and follow a few Instagram accounts I want to point you to.
by Elyse’ Jokinen
Tangerine Clamshell Dream is the personal blog of my internet friend and collaborator Elyse’ Jokinen. Elyse’ is a wonderful collage artist and photographer. She also runs Wilder Collage, an incredible online community of collage artists.
I helped her design and publish the first two entries of Wilder Roam (so far!), a series of portable art anthology books.
by Duane Toops
Duane Toops is a prolific and poetic collage maker who feels a deep connection to his work. He says he struggles with writing, but I think he’s a damn good one.
His work is often abstract and explores the boundary between analog and digital—something I am keenly interested in.
by Lisa McKenna
Running with Scissors is a recent discovery of mine—but it’s so good! Lisa apparently had just returned from an extended hiatus and I am glad she did. In addition to a stellar publication, she shares “how it started / how it ended” collages on Substack Notes, showing the transformative power of juxtaposition in collage.
She also a graphic designer by day who is obsessed with the public domain, sharing a “Public Domain Image of the Week” in the newsletter.
by Paris Collage Collective
Collage Spamouflage is the newsletter of the Paris Collage Collective, a popular and international collage community that offers weekly challenges.
The newsletter, aka The Weekender, offers weekly collage news and inspiration. It’s a treat!
Collage Academy
There are TONS of collage artists on Instagram. I couldn’t name them all if I tried. But one of my favorite accounts about collage is Collage Academy. This account is dedicated to collage history, learning, and research. It is a part of CollageWave.
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
—Nathaniel
Colophon
A Book Designer’s Notebook is a newsletter about book design and creative practice for writers, designers, and book lovers.
It uses the typefaces Merriweather, Futura, and whatever fonts Substack has chosen. Merriweather is a Google font designed to be a text face that is pleasant to read on screens. Futura is geometric sans-serif designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It is on the moon.
Nathaniel Roy is a book designer, collage maker, photo taker, self publisher, and a few other things in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
You can see his work and hire him here. If you want to support this newsletter, you can buy him a coffee here.
I understand the irony of pointing this out on the heels of my denigrating AI-generated images and that I may be on the “wrong side of history” here.
In light of Duchamp and his fountain, I’m willing to amend my earlier statement to say that while AI-generated images are not art, what someone does with them could be. But like I said, I don’t fucking know!
For more on this, I recommend looking into the work of Mitch Goldstein.
Or sometimes a combination of these at the same time! My collage above, Untitled Film Still #666, is based on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still #21. I also took this collage further by scanning it, manipulating it on the scanner bed, and then manipulating it even more in Photoshop to create Untitled Film Still #666 (Remix).
Thanks so much for the mention! But even more importantly thank you for mentioning Katrien De Blouwer more people should know about her and her work. It's so poetic, and if there's one artist I wish I could emulate stylistically, it's her.
Thanks for sharing a selection of your art with the essay, Nathaniel—excellent artworks.
I wholeheartedly agree with your Substack recommendations. Top peeps!
I've been doing collage the past few months, heavily using AI generations as a comment on reclaiming the creative aspect. It's also part of a conversation about where collage assets come from.
Here's to an even bigger movement in collage—one in which nobody needs to be concerned with perfection, as you say. Curiosity, play, and exploration are where it's at.