Birthday Pig. Goat With Girl’s Head. © Marnie Weber. You Are What You Eat. © Haley Nagy.
Sometimes the best validation is discovering a successful artist whose work is very similar to yours, either aesthetically or conceptually, or whose work embodies the very direction you were heading.
Marnie Weber‘s collage work is very close to what I had in mind for this summer’s series. I can honestly say I’d never seen her artwork until this week and the project I had sketched out was uninfluenced by Weber. Yet I find it reassuring to know that even though I’m in small town Austin, I’m exploring the collage medium in the same way as artists in Los Angeles. Location may be important to the creative soul, but it’s nothing countless hours of internet art exploration can’t make up for if you don’t live in the hub of all the action. The world wide web is my classroom and I think it will play an indispensable role in the way we understand art in the future both by how it informs the artistic process and how it influences the ever growing public audience.
It is very exciting to see an artist who works in collage and new media being accepted by the art community and taken seriously. This gives me confidence that my new work will find an audience that appreciates it… even if it is still a niche in the market.
