Inspirational gluebook artists – Mary Green

I’m sometimes asked who inspires me. I have a list of people whose work in collage art, particularly vintage collage art, really inspire me. The first person I want to mention, and probably the person who has most influenced my love of collaging vintage papers, is Mary Green.

Who is Mary Green?

I discovered Mary’s blog called Green Paper by accident. I was looking for information and inspiration of altered book pages and wandered on to her site. I loved how enthusiastic she was about the art she was creating. She also encouraged others by offering a tutoring class on making collage art. I wish I was around when the signup was open for that!

She has a gallery on her site and I’m going to show a couple of images of her work here. Make sure you head over to see her other images. She also has a section of free images. There are lots of neat things you could make with those images.

Why she’s special

For a lot of her work, Mary would use original vintage papers. She was the first person I saw who actually tore up old book pages, cards, receipts, etc, and use them in her work. To me that was so gutsy and inspirational. She writes about it in her blog post called, “What if we die?” She says,

So, I am committing myself to using the real thing even more often. Who will appreciate it and enjoy it more than we do? Would I rather it was thrown away by an unsuspecting relative 30 years from now, or would I prefer to take a deep breath and glue it down onto something beautiful, so it will be seen and appreciated…by me and my blog friends at least!

How true that is! If you are recycling old material into something new, something a new audience will see and appreciate, then all the more reason to use papers that often have little to no value as they are, in an attic or being given away, or even that go straight into the trash or recycle. Of course I’m not talking about important historic family documents, just the every day bits of living long ago.

My gluebook pages

I began a vintage gluebook, inspired by Mary Green, where I use only vintage papers from 1945 and older. I took an old grammar book and turned it into an altered book by tearing out some pages and gluing some pages together to make them stronger. Then my altered book became my gluebook when I started using my paper vintage paper scraps.

After I got to work, I assembled about a dozen pages. Sometimes there was a theme, other times there was not, such as the one below. I simply liked the way the papers worked together. 

I have a number of photos from this gluebook in my gallery. When you are on my BLOG page, on the right side is a photo gallery where you can see more. I need to update it and add the few more that I’ve completed.

How she inspires me today

Mary Green’s art and blog posts are one of the reasons I started the Vintage Gluebooks and Pages Facebook group. I wanted a place where I could create and show my art, and encourage others to share what they have made as well. It’s so great to see what wonderful pieces of art people make with vintage papers. Come check it out if you are interested.

I’ll continue later with another post about who inspires me. There are so many creative people around. It will be fun to introduce you to some new names if you aren’t already familiar with them.