Collage artist Beth Hoeckel makes the case for “more is more.” Born and raised in Baltimore, MD and now based in Austin TX, Hoeckel earned a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied painting, photography, and printmaking—but, her main area of expertise is in the medium of collage.
Over the past 5 years, her work has been exhibited around the world and published in many prestigious books and magazines, with selected clients including Rookie, Domino, The New York Times, and many more. But mostly, she can found creating collage and mixed media art for arts’ sake.
An avid collector of vintage ephemera, her collages are made of images cut from vintage publications ranging from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. “In my earlier work, I’ve used a lot of imagery from National Geographic and other magazines that were super widely published,” she shared with society6’s blog. “Now I try to really search and find more unique things, but it’s definitely more spontaneous.”
With her creative process relying as much on intuition as it does on careful planning, the end result comes as a pleasant surprise. “I love to mindlessly flip through pages and then tear out any page that I like or that speaks to me in some way,” says Hoeckel. “The next step is cutting out specific bits from those pages and then I scan them. I used to do everything totally analog, but now I am working on digitizing a lot of my materials and putting them on a hard drive so that everything can be portable. But basically I am extremely intuitive and so the whole process is informed by my subconscious. That includes knowing when a work is complete. It’s 100% based on feeling.”
Her Instagram page awakens our inner artist.
