Kelsey Herber, School Programs Associate
The focus of this month’s Saturday Studio is that of the work of John Miller, on display now through January 31 in Hot off the Grill! Glass Works of John Miller. Miller’s larger-than-life glass sculptures offer immersion into a world of realistic diner burgers and fries that dwarf the viewer.
Miller’s sculptures bring light to the importance of scale in an artwork. The size an artist chooses to make any part of their artwork makes a difference in deciphering the emphasis of the piece. Miller’s glass sculptures depicting popcorn, french fries, burgers, and more as giant-sized, shed some light on the aspects of a diner that Miller wants to emphasize most, especially when compared to the average-sized seating with which the sculptures are paired. Let’s practice playing around with scale and emphasis the same way John Miller does, but with collage!
Materials:
- Paper
- Collage source material (magazines, newspaper clippings, etc.)
- Scissors and/or Xacto knife
- Glue stick
Collage is one of the easiest and most accessible ways to make art with what you have at home. It is also exciting because you’re at the mercy of whatever imagery is available to you through printed media. I began flipping through some old National Geographic magazines until I found a few images that I thought could go together, keeping scale in mind. I sought images with subjects of drastically different printed size.
Carefully use your scissors or Xacto knife to remove your desired image from the rest of the page, making sure not to cut out detailed edges. Then, simply arrange the images on a fresh sheet of paper or a large background picture you find in your print media in a way that emphasizes the scale. The images I used were all things where the scale is completely different than usual, which tells an entirely different story than if the scale were accurate.
For more inspiration for your next larger-than-life art project, see Hot off the Grill! Glass Works of John Miller, on display at FWMoA now through January 31, 2027.