Summer holiday collage

Collage (29.7 x 21cm); ink and paper torn from a Gudrun Sjöden catalogue

This was inspired by the background roundel from an Alfons Mucha image. Mucha’s work uses many circles and mosaics behind the pretty women. Sometimes I find the backgrounds more interesting than the image as a whole. I don’t think he would have minded his work being used as a starting point - he wrote an entire series of textbooks called ‘Documents Decoratifs’ with motifs for art students to use.

Gudrun Sjöden is a Swedish designer. Her catalogues, like her clothing, are high quality. The colour palettes are always interesting and coordinated with the backgrounds. It always feels such a shame to simply throw the catalogues away, so I’ve been using them for awhile now for collage for my university work, for example the Mesopotamian monster.