Paper Collage & Montage

louistf.com

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I have worked as an artist and designer for the past 20 years, producing work that has varied from digital editorial illustrations for magazines and collage record sleeve artwork, to hand drawn graphics for the fashion industries. Since joining Red Herring Studios in 2018, I have concentrated more intensely on my own collage works for galleries and exhibitions, patiently honing a particular style of surreal, by utilising colours, textures and images born out of my dusty collections of books and ephemera from c.1870-1970.

I primarily employ art as a tool to reveal parallel worlds that exist side by side one another –highlighting the often-ridiculous past/present, technological/biological, analogue/digital clashes that increasingly ripple throughout society.

Addressing contemporary popular culture’s strident desire for ‘perfection’, I combine sourced materials from ephemera spanning across the 20th Century, in the form of photography, graphics and advertisements (the glorious imperfections of yesteryear) and send them into battle against current trends and obsessions that often seem driven by lunacy and self-promotion.

As such, I have developed into an ‘image editor’; turning existing visual narratives on their head – exploring humanity’s reliance on chance and the serendipitous seconds that give rise to sudden revelations of character or twists in a tale. The anomalous storytelling of my collage artworks speak of immediate/sudden narrative clashes, the fragments of images aiding me to propel the past into the present, and championing their new found life as works of art-anachronisms.

As much of the source material as possible is retained within my collage projects, whether these are paper-margins, borders or credits; sometimes the presence of such details are essential in the act of anchoring of them to their analogue heritage whilst also directly acknowledging the beauty of the source material itself.

Get in touch at louis@louistf.com or visit louistf.com for more examples of Louis’ work and to purchase artworks.