Artist Critique

Robert Wilkes – Jesse Treece – Unit 38 Mixed Media Collage

Treece’s main works used images/pages from vintage magazines and books to create simple but surreal collages. The use of the vintage imagery created a unique, recognizable style in his work. His work focuses on interpreting the simple and complex elements of modern living. Treece often used images of space and children to create this distorted perspective on day-to-day life often merging simple items with absurd ones.

Over Jesse Treece’s career he has made many collages in this style and has worked on many collaboration’s with different collage artists and has worked for a number of different projects. He sells prints of most of his work and has been featured in art galleries magazines and interviews in multiple countries.

Treece uses the same techniques across all his work. As stated his images come from vintage books and magazines, which are hand cut and put together as a collage. His works often tend to be very eye catching and unique in their appearance some of which are highly detailed pieces of work. Asides from his subject matter Treece uses a very common way of making collages. His work is obviously done in more detail but the method of a cut and paste collage is one of the more traditional ways of working.

Due to the use of vintage imagery most of Treece’s collages have a common colour scheme and appearance to them. This does not only make his work very recognizable but lets the different images he’s gathered work with each other in sense of colour and style. With a digital collage this would be done in, for example, Photoshop to make the colours match and blend more effectively.

Although the style that Treece has used can be seen in many digital mixed media artworks. Working this way digitally would massively speed up the process at which these collages can be created.