Green Your Magazine Habit (With A Little Artistic Inspiration)

Raise your hand if you’re a fan of magazines. Oh…you, too? It’s a shame that there’s no such thing as a 12 step program for magazine addiction because I’m pretty sure that I’d be the first junkie standing in line every week. Everyone knows that the most crucial step in the recovery process is admitting that a problem actually exists…and trust me, it does. In my case, once a slick mag crosses the threshold of my home, it never makes it out alive.

Despite being a recycler of the highest order, I can never seem to part with my ever-growing stack of glossy, life-altering promises. Slickly packaged issues beckon me at every turn with their neon affirmations that I, too can achieve Plastic Surgery-Free Glam!…Killer Abs In One Week Flat!...Inner Peace With Zero Drugs!...and Magnetic Love With No Stalker Side Effects! Despite knowing better, I’m prone to reserving such titles for that rainy, idyllic day that never ever actually comes. As a result, a makeshift Leaning Tower of Pisa has risen from the ashes of my procrastination.

In the hands of a (perhaps) more motivated green enthusiast endowed with superb speed-reading skills, a stack of magazines has the potential to spring forth into countless new incarnations…many requiring nothing more than a slight dose of creative inspiration. Barring the obvious (curbside recycling, crafty entertainment for the kiddies, and donating them to retirement communities, friends, libraries, hospitals, school art departments, etc.), what new life can old magazines take on?

·        Make envelopes, cards and gift tags

·        Create packing material by sending pages through the shredder

·        Wrap presents

·        Dress up gifts with handmade magazine bows

·        Wrap old tea canisters and other containers

Yeah, yeah…I’ve heard it all before. Gimme something new. Well, if you have serious artistic leanings, you might want to tear a magazine page (or two) out of American artist, Jonathan Burstein’s book. He digs through oodles of back issues of Modern Painter, Artforum and art museum catalogs in order to cull choice visual tidbits and scraps for his phenomenal textural collage portraits. 

This 2007 Burstein portrait (entitled "Laura") was created entirely with cut-outs from harvested magazine pages and measures an impressive 44 X 44 inches. That's a whole lotta scissor cuts.

Both magazine-mosaics depict creative women who Burstein has encountered in his artistic circle. The image below (entitled "Katie") shares the same dimensions as the previous portrait - but as you can see, the beauty of his execution is completely distinct and entirely mesmerizing.

Fred Tomaselli is yet another American artist who weaves magazine images into his visually stunning creations along with quite a quirky selection of unconventional recycled objects, including weeds, leaves, flower petals, tree branches and sometimes even pharmaceutical drugs (Whaaa? Better on the canvas rather than flushed down the toilet and permeating our water supply.)

This 2002 Tomaselli creation (above), entitled "Expecting To Fly", incorporates hundreds of magazine-derived hands, fragmented bits of human anatomy, winged creatures and flowers along with textural elements collected from nature.

"Study For Big Hummingbird" emerged out of Tomaselli's keen interest in gardening, a pastime that he initially indulged in to camouflage his even greater affection for homegrown Cannabis. These days, he just sticks to bird watching, veggie growing and art.  Probably a good thing. So, what do you do with your magazines once you've read them from cover-to-cover?