Earlier today, Michael Dooley of Print Magazine’s Imprint blog posted his interview with artist and designer Graham Moore, entitled A Designer’s Midcentury-Mod Music-Graphics Mashups. It is Moore’s collage art that is the focus of the piece. If I could own one of the collages displayed along with the interview or on Moore’s website, it would be GrahamMoore_04.jpg/mo-dernes.jpg (see below), which I imagine to be an enigmatic glimpse of the 1960s through the lens of a parched but ultra-stylish future:
I would love to see more collages by Moore along the same lines, but, alas, “Mo Dernes” seems to be a one-off… although here’s a piece from Moore’s sketchbook that explains the silhouettes of the women:
See also here and here on Moore’s site for more sketchbook variations on the silhouette theme.
Magritte did a lot with silhouettes. I’ll post some examples when I have a moment…
BONUS IMAGES:
[CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE]
Update (10 October 2012):
Just thought I would mention here that I contacted Graham Moore after I posted the above images and information and asked him if the mo-dernes collage was for sale — it was! — and even though his asking price was a little beyond what my meagre acquisitions budget can ordinarily sustain for a single work of art, Graham kindly made it possible for me to own the piece by allowing me to pay for it in affordable instalments spread out over about three months.
And as I told Graham by email when I finally had the artwork in hand, I’m very pleased with my purchase. Mo-dernes is a page cut from Graham’s sketchbook, and as such, I expected it to be smaller than it is. In fact, the piece is fairly large for an old-fashioned, hand-cut, magazine-image collage. And needless to say, aesthetically speaking, it really hits a sweet spot for me in terms of composition, colour, and content. I won’t torture you with a formal analysis of what you can see for yourself; however, I must say, this time around, with the actual artwork in front of me, I’m especially taken with the way that the physical texture of the orange paint that Graham has mopped and dragged across the grain of the paper echoes the virtual black-and-white texture visible most clearly in the skin of the models inside the silhouettes. Lovely!