'Layers' could be interpreted through the subject matter and/or the artist's method of working. Kurt Schwitters (above) created collages with found objects and then worked into them. Jacques Villegle was inspired by torn billboards (below) and particularly focused on the typographic elements.
Valerie Roybal is a contemporary artists working in collage, she takes books and journals and creates more orderly compositions, often incorporating embroidery (below). Just as Schwitters and Villegle, she juxtaposes images and text to allow the viewer to decide on their own interpretations.
Barbara Lee Smith is a textile artist who works in mixed media. Her landscape pieces are painted, printed and stitched. The work below is entitled 'Estuary' and you can see a detail below that.
Swedish illustrator Camilla Engman collects simple objects like these envelopes and then lets them inspire her narrative drawings.
Norma Starszakowna is a textile artist who uses mixed media techniques to create pieces that evoke the memories left within the walls of buildings.
Anthony Brown created a series of paintings for an exhibition in Liverpool about 100 famous creative people from the city. Each portrait is worked over the top of newspaper headlines, photographs and images of events from the subjects life, such as this portrayal of John Lennon.
Nick Gentry paints portraits on old floppy discs (see below), carefully aligning the pupils of the eyes with the centre of the discs.
The Expressionist movement utilised striking contrast and colour to convey strong emotions. Kathe Kollwitz's work (above) was about maternal loss and she used the relatively simple medium of lino print to produce her powerful images. The changing moods of the clowns in George Rouault's work (below) is expressed as much through the mark making as the colours.
Takahiro Kimura's paintings and drawings (below) use multiple imagery to show our ever changing moods in a surprisingly subtle way.
John Stezaker's collages of old film star images (below) may seem simple at first glance, but matching the images takes great skills and hours of work.
Zach Johnson's work shows that mood isn't just expressed through the face. Our bodies strongly show emotion. He embellishes his images with explosive mark making to emphasise this.
