Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Douglas Hale Makes Psychedelic Collages of FKA Twigs and Greek Statues

Douglas Hale multiplies, extends, and flips imagery to create kaleidoscopic and surrealist pictures. With his mind-bending configurations, it is no wonder he has been commissioned by Tessa Rose Jackson, Imagine Dragons, and Flyleaf to illustrate albums and merchandise. It is clear Hale has an interest in music, as many of his collages feature musicians like FKA Twigs and Erykah Badu. In these portraits, Hale adorns the singers with heavily ornate jewels and gold. Sparkle features prominently in Hale's collages, including those of ancient Greek portrait busts puking gold. These, like many of Hale's pictures, are set against rainbow backdrops and imbue his images with a dream-like 80s sentiment.

Douglas Hale multiplies, extends, and flips imagery to create kaleidoscopic and surrealist pictures. With his mind-bending configurations, it is no wonder he has been commissioned by Tessa Rose Jackson, Imagine Dragons, and Flyleaf to illustrate albums and merchandise. It is clear Hale has an interest in music, as many of his collages feature musicians like FKA Twigs and Erykah Badu. In these portraits, Hale adorns the singers with heavily ornate jewels and gold. Sparkle features prominently in Hale’s collages, including those of ancient Greek portrait busts puking gold. These, like many of Hale’s pictures, are set against rainbow backdrops and imbue his images with a dream-like 80s sentiment.

While some of Hale’s images verge on fashion aesthetics, they each retain an element of the weird, thus enticing one to take a second look. In one image, a regal women wearing a gold crown and corset stands tall against a stock photo of a blue sky. The picture seems like something out of vintage Vogue, until one realizes Hale has sliced thin horizontal lines through the model’s neck and thighs.

Whether pulling apart the thematic elements of One Thousand and One Nights or bringing the moon to earth, Hale succeeds at inverting the expected to create supernatural people and places.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
He's been labeled a legendary master of collage and a "Punk Art Surrealist". Bay Area artist Winston Smith has been making his thought-provoking surrealist collages since the 1970s. Smith left the U.S. in 1969 to study art in Italy and experienced "a massive case of culture shock" upon his return. Struck by the profound social changes that had occurred during his absence, he began taking "safe" images from magazines to create politically-charged works of art.
The technicolor work of Miami-based digital collage artist Dana Fortune combines futuristic environments with vintage models to suggest continuity between the past and future. Rainbows are featured prominently in each of her collages, bringing levity and optimism, or perhaps just a veneer of optimism, to each piece.
Eva Eun-Sil Han’s mixed-media collage works use geometry and line to create surreal and mysterious scenes. By replicating circle cut-outs, the Belgium-based artist obscures parts of photographic images with what look like a cross between clouds and censor pixels. In some pieces, the circles are the focus of the work, layered on top of one another in fish-scale patterns. The repetition of color and size creates a soothing visual rhythm, which gives a feeling of cohesion despite the variety of patterns. Often invoking the baroque period, the images have a regal feel to them, which is reinforced by the stark black and white with gold palette in some pieces.
San Francisco-based artist John Vochatzer channels Hieronymus Bosch in his dynamic and complex collages that utilize both religious iconography and natural imagery to shock and inspire. Vochatzer initially delved into surrealism as a teenaged oil painter “fruitlessly trying to emulate Salvador Dali”- since then, he has only further pursued “bizarre and fantastical” aesthetics, which converge powerfully in his works.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List