Alison Pullen | Working in Situ with Collage

I started doing collages when I went to an art class every week after school from 7yrs old to 13yrs.  As well as all sorts of arts and crafts, the tutor got me tearing out pieces of coloured magazine pages to make a picture and my journey with collage began. Later whilst at the Royal College of Art, I realised that I had 2 years there and needed to make the most of the experience. I examined all the different ways of working I had used on my degree course and came to the conclusion that it was collage that I had the most affinity with. So decided quite consciously to just concentrate on that for 2 years whilst studying for my Masters.

Knowing I had to concentrate on my strengths was a great help, but I also knew I was interested in atmosphere, a sense of place and worked best under pressure in situ so I developed my practice to suit this.  My father was an architect, this and my interest in people combined to mean I did a lot of interiors or exteriors that people used like parks, cafes, public buildings etc. For my degree, I had done a lot of drawings/paintings at night from trains, of buildings, houses. This continued to evolve into painting rooms in people's houses as it combined my interest in the people themselves, architecture, light and atmosphere and working in situ; the painting of the room becomes like a portrait of the person who owns it. That is what is important to me.

In the paintings of historic houses, it is what the owner/designer intended us to think of the owner and the thought of all the people who have lived there that fascinates me.  Like layers of wallpaper, each person has left their mark in the room.  What has happened in those rooms in the people's lives...I am fascinated by the possibilities and trying to capture that in my work.

I love collage because in using it you already have something that needs changing and you can leave some elements whether they are colour/texture or because they are photos, whole scenes which are a reference to another place or space.  I am in control of the process and yet not because the unconscious can become apparent.  

The actual process of sitting in the room and looking through lots of magazine pages and picking the right ones makes me think about the work a lot even before I have picked up a paintbrush, not just in getting the proportions, drawing the composition or getting the light/dark levels right but also my intentions for the whole work.  It is the imaginative element of the work and frees up what is possible in a painting.

At college in the early 90's the work was postcard size and they have increasingly become larger as I have become more proficient in the collage technique. I need them to be larger to be a challenge. Similarly I go back to favourite places to stretch me as I need to produce something different from the same interior.  

The work changes with my mood, the light levels, the people around me, what they are saying, each environment has an effect on a final painting.

I have recently enjoyed including more collage elements of cut out solid pieces of colour - maybe from seeing the Matisse cut-outs exhibition or maybe a need to make the images more obviously collage as I get more proficient.

I do exterior collages and have recently done a commission of someone's garden.  Am always happy to do something challenging.  I am trained as a book illustrator.  I always find collage inspiring, but I think I have a particular affinity with interiors because they are so personal a thing.  How we are behave in them, the process of creating them, how we live in them and fundamentally what is the life of them beyond the moment that I am painting them. I am always grateful when I am given an opportunity to paint in a new location, it is exciting and inspiring, it drives my work forward.