Hollie Chastain is a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based artist, who works with photographs, newspapers, and other vintage narratives and paper, to create mixed media collages. Chastain says that collages appeal to her as a medium because they are versatile. To her, creating collages allows the artist to experiment with piecing together different colors and textures, without being hindered by a lack of talent in drawing. Collages allow artists to create and repurpose stories even if the artist can not draw or create the individual pieces of that story they want to use. Chastain shares that she began working with creating collages, and repurposing older narratives, in 2008. Her admiration of vintage book covers led to her passion for repurposing old photographs, newspapers, etc. To Chastain, it is truly special to be able to regenerate older works, and give them a new story in her collages. Chastain’s work inspires me so much because I believe that everyone lives a unique story during their life, and I think that it is unfortunate that most people’s stories are lost once they pass. But Chastain has brought different stories from different times back to the present by incorporating vintage mediums in her collages. Chastain has continued, and added onto each of those pieces’ stories, without taking away from their history and character. What really draws me in about Chastain’s work is the movement she incorporated into the vintage mediums. Often, the subject in Chastain’s collage is doing something, which adds a sense of action to pieces that may not have depicted movement originally, such as letters, and book titles. The movement created a feeling that these pieces’ stories were not over, but were still going on, and continuing. They were not still and finished, but flowing and running. Chastain also seemed to bring a sense of life into the inanimate objects she used like books and posters, by adding emotion through facial expressions, or by adding movement. You can check out Chastain’s amazing art at her own website here: https://www.holliechastain.com/
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AuthorI started taking Art seriously in Eighth Grade when I took a Character Design Class. Archives
May 2020
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