I've been doing a project about photomontage, and absolutely fell in love with this artist's style.. with his work that includes photomontage and his work without it.
That artist is called Dave McKean!
So I was searching 'photomontagers' for research and I came across this guy's work, and maybe I had some initial favouritism towards him as when I typed his name into Google it mentioned that he is an Illustrator as well, so I thought 'hmmm...maybe he's worth looking at because that's what I want to do!'. Anyway I saw his work and I just immediately warmed to it. Before I go off on a tangent about his work, here's some background info:
Dave McKean was born in 1963 in Berkshire and had already begun work as an Illustrator before he left university. His main client for illustrations was authour, Neil Gaiman, who wrote things like the Sandman graphic novels and The Graveyard Book. McKean went on to design CD covers and even illustrate his own books. Let's look at his work:
When McKean worked with Neil Gaiman, he produced some illustrations by hand and some via photomontage. Both are great but his photomontage work stands out to me more.
This is an example of one of the Sandman covers which uses photomontage. Personally, I have no clue what the series is about, but just looking at this cover, which has no type whatsoever, makes an impression on me. I notice that unlike Richard Hamilton's work, whose works are obviously a montage of a group of random images; Mckean takes to producing a more subtle effect when combining images. Ignore the image with the skeletons and focus on the background: The parchment image and the rocky texture have been subtly combined by how they fade into each other. This creates the effect of a whole new image, whereas Hamilton's work didn't particularly use effects to combine, they were just organised and re-sized which produced a fantastical atmosphere; whereas Mckean's style brings a more realistic tone.
This has to be my absolute favourite photomontage design done by McKean. I think it's mainly because he's used the photo montage technique to effectively illustrate the title of the album: "SCENES FROM A MEMORY". He's taken a really imaginative approach to it, which again, is fully successful due to his subtle way of weaving imagery together. We see that the base image is the man's face, but there's an impression of various smaller images being layered over the top to illustrate the 'scenes'. What makes this more effective is how these images seem to fade out and then become more obvious in different parts of the main face. The new images are further subtly added by keeping the general colour scheme the same so they don't stand out too much, The black background adds to a suspenseful atmosphere as well.
Finally, we have this image. It is more obvious that manipulation has been used, like with the nose and mouth, but McKean still was successful in keeping the texture the same so we still have the impression that it is made out of paper. For me this image is quite eerie, maybe due to the sepia tone or the abstract imagery of it. With the rips in the paper, again it is obvious that they've been manipulated to resemble eyes; however McKean has added random imperfections and rips to these so they still seem like genuine rips. It's hard to explain, and I'm sorry! But the abstract qulities of McKean's work is what keeps me more compelled to look at it.
What is consistent with McKean is that he uses subtle techniques of combining contrasting images. By doing this he creates an abnormal image, but the attention to detail of making images compliment each other by colour or fading tools gives a realistic tone to an unusual combination. Sorry but that's the best way of explaining it. He makes his wacky creations believable, unlike Hamilton who simply put a cluster of images together with no form of linking them by tools.
I love McKean's work, and I hope to use his techniques in my own work: Subtle tools to create a harmonious combination seems to be the tool!
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