The mature photography graduate inspired by Picasso and Hockney

Inspired by artists such as David Hockney, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Robert Delaunay, Argentinian graduate Daniel M Cisilino fell in love with collage while studying at the National College of Art & Design (NCAD) in Dublin.

 

house

 

He describes the experience of learning about Hockney’s collages – or joiners as the Yorkshireman calls them – as akin to opening a Pandora’s Box. “I began to see photography in a completely different way. Hockney created photographic works by arranging multiple images in a similar way to a painter who uses brush strokes to create his work. They were not just photographs, they were more encompassing than that. This fascinated me, and I got hooked.”

 

coffeetable

 

Cisilino, who completed a certificate in photography and digital imaging at NCAD, set about photographing scenes close to home – his back garden, a bathroom, household paraphernalia – creating hundreds of images he could stitch together digitally. The idea, he explains, was to do away with a single viewpoint in favour of multiple perspectives. His method involved photographing each scene from various 90-degree angles, then assembling the images digitally to recreate a “normal perspective”.

 

bathroom

 

The collages are time-consuming to make, says the 50-year-old engineer, who has been based in Dublin since 2011. He’s made five so far; one in particular, a collage of a red brick house [top], took more than 42 hours to complete, and the others took between 14 and 18 hours each. “I used Lightroom 4 to process the raw files from my camera, and GIMP 2 software, which is similar to Photoshop but free, to make the collages,” explains Cisilino. If any of the collages had a gap in composition, Cisilino would go back and take more pictures to add to it until he was happy with the result.

 

backgarden

 

“I like the idea of using photographs as raw material,” he adds. “I paid particular attention to the background images in each collage, and used texture and colour in harmony with the subjects.”

First published in the July 2014 issue. You can complete your collection and buy back issues in the BJP Shop.

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