How much of collage
is a happy accident?

Joe Webb

"There’s a bit of luck involved..."

Joe Webb is an artist in the medium of collage, juxtaposing and re-contextualizing images, so we might see the familiar in unfamiliar ways. It clearly resonates, with his artworks shared online by the hundreds of thousands.

The grandfather of collage artwork Max Ernst famously embraced a little surrealist randomness in the way he put his found images together, and Joes work has some of that spirit. It’s a classic case of creativity where 1+1= 3. So the obvious question to ask is how much of these collages is a happy accident?

Many of the cut outs take years to find a home.

Joe Webb, A Curate's Egg
Firstly I’ll cut out a nice retro image that I feel could work as a collage someday, lose it under a pile of other papers, find it again, file it somewhere…perhaps.

Joe Webb, A Curate's Egg
Then it could be a week, a month, a year until I stumble across something else that the original cut out could work with.

Joe Webb, A Curate's Egg
Creating the collages is mostly down to luck, serendipity and an ability to find hundreds of individually cut out images when you need them!

Joe Webb, A Curate's EggJoe Webb, A Curate's EggJoe Webb, A Curate's Egg

www.joewebbart.com

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