Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, September: John Stezaker

For this material project, I looked into the artist John Stezaker who creates beautiful pieces by joining two images together; a romantic landscape and an image form a romantic film. From looking at his art, for 30 years or more Stezaker has been pondering visual incongruity, inverting, rotating, slicing and splicing pairs of old images to create new works of art. His juxtapositions are anything but seamless – colour/black and white, male/female, portrait/landscape – precisely so that the eye is confronted by obvious disunities that the mind must somehow resolve.

Sometimes the idea is so simple one marvels, above all, at the strange effects. Stezaker removes the top half of a starlet in jodhpurs and her braced legs appear inexplicably monumental. He crops Big Ben so that the clockface is tiny against the glorious frame-filling sunset above, time mocked by mere elements. He nips and tucks: one film star is blinded by the excision of a narrow strip across the eyes; another becomes bug-eyed by the doubling of this strip, which also gives the collage an optical shudder.

I decided to look into him for inspiration because he contradicts beautiful, natural landscapes with images from what can be seen as other-wordly, which is comparable to me moving to Cardiff from North Wales where I was always surrounded by mountains and nature. His work also, in my opinion, works well with this event because one of the images he took was from Betws-Y-Coed, which is about twenty minutes away from where I live. I tried doing this with my own work by comparing Cardiff to my village; looking at the similarities as well as my new experiences.