One day, I took a round glass jar with a lid with birds filigreed on it  and put in it bits of glass from a broken mug and pieces of red candle wax. I thought it was just a nice decoration. What I didn’t know is that what I was doing was called altered art.

 I come from an artistic family, most of my brothers and my sister sing and play the guitar and my father used to sing well too. Also, a few of the boys have the ability to paint, which I never had. My mother painted an entire child’s room back in the 50’s with clown murals and my paternal grandfather was a well-known painter.

When I was young, I was lucky if I could draw a house but liked to do collages I’d find magazines and put together pictures of what I thought were similar images. I’d have a collage of Disney characters and a collage of things in a kitchen, that sort of thing.

Later while attending collage as a returning student, I enjoyed photography classes and one ceramics class.

In the last few years though, I have begun delving into what you might call three-dimensional collages. Collages made up of objects such as scrap booking items, old earrings, pretty much anything.

During one wet weekend I was poking around on the Internet and discovered that though what I like to do is a type of collage it is also part of a movement called “altered art”.  One definition I found that is very apt is: “it gives a new artistic life to old and/or used mundane, utilitarian items through the application of techniques and
combinations, some recognized as standard artistic methods, some not.”[1]

So the next time an earring breaks or you are about to pass by a stand at the local flea market selling or giving away little knick knacks, think about how you could use that in an art form such as collage.

[1] http://www.fragileindustries.com/what_is_altered_art.html