Artists working in Mixed Media Artwork and Collage

Mixed media, refers to an artwork in which more than one medium has been employed. A range3 of wet and dry materials are commonly used in mixed media artworks. This can create a vusual energy and tension that a single media cannot achieve.

There is an important distinction between "mixed-media" artworks and "multimedia art". Mixed media tends to refer to a work of visual art that combines various traditionally distinct visual art media. For example, a work on canvas that combines paint, ink, and collage could properly be called a "mixed media" work - but not a work of "multimedia art." The term multimedia art combines visual art with non-visual elements (such as recorded sound, for example) or with elements of the other arts (such as literature, drama, dance, motion graphics, music, or interactivity) and is often computer based.

Many interesting effects can be achieved by using mixed media in an artwork. Often, found objects are used in conjunction with traditional artist media, such as paints and graphite, to express a meaning in the everyday life. In this manner, many different elements of art become more flexible than with traditional artist media. Often the outcome is a collage.

The earliest examples of paper collage are the work of twelfth-century Japanese calligraphers, who prepared surfaces for their poems by gluing bits of paper and fabric to create a background for brushstrokes. Later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Near East, craftsmen cut and pasted intricate designs and used marbled papers as part of the art of bookbinding.

Artists in medieval times, beginning in the thirteenth century, often enhanced religious images with gemstones, elegant fibers, relics and precious metals.

Renaissance artisans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in western European countries pasted paper and fabric to decorate the backgrounds of coats of arms in genealogical records. Cut-paper silhouettes appeared in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Craftsmen in prehistoric and primitive societies in many parts of the world used seed, shell, straw, feathers and butterfly wings as collage material. Shamans and holy men in some societies secure these and other materials to masks used in sacred rituals. All of these materials appear occasionally in artists’ collages today.

During the nineteenth century collage developed as a popular art, more of a hobby than an art form.

There were a few serous collage artists in the late nineteenth century, pasting intricate paper cutouts onto backgrounds. Hans Christian Andersen created illustrations for a book this way. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, graphic artists arranged type and bold, cut-out shapes to create theater posters and illustrations. The introduction of photography led to photomontage, the combining of photographs into artistic arrangements.

Art historians generally attribute the first use of collage in fine art in the 20th C to Pablo Picasso in 1912, when he glued a piece of patterned oilcloth to a cubist still life.

The avant-garde adopted this new mixed media approach and quickly branched out. Cubists used mostly paper and paint, sometimes in a patchwork quilt fashion, with the occasional realistic object added to support a pictorial concept or philosophical viewpoint. Futurists incorporated typography for political commentary and added found objects to connect art with the real world. Dadaists found collage an ideal means of expressing anti-art nonsense, bringing together outrageous combination of materials for shock value. Surrealists saw thepossiblity of using collage as a revelation of unconscious thoughts brought to the surface through the random selection and placement of materials.

While not considered a more traditional art form, the purchase of a mixed media work can provide a type of movement and excitment not so easily achieved with a single medium.