Season 1: The Chateau Season
Episode 19: Michael Manning, Visual Artist
In this episode, I interview Michael Manning, a collage artist from Boston, Massachusetts, also known as Westwood. Michael has been doing collage art since he was about 14 years old and took it professional right out of college in 2013. His creative work focuses on piecing together elements of modern-day identity, exploring the things that people collect and finding serendipity in those moments – always focused on cooperation, collage, collections, and fascinated with words. Michael’s creative process is built around asking questions – he believes it’s all about collection and asking good questions, trusting that if you ask the right questions, you’ll very naturally find the answers.
He loves questions and diversity in his work. His specific process involves finding an image first, often getting a commission to recreate a photograph, which he projects onto a canvas and then works almost like a paint-by-numbers approach. He rifles through magazines and materials that people discard, looking for pieces of paper and colours – going through systematically to find specific colours like blues or greens, then skin tones, building up his palette. He describes finding the colours he needs and then trying to find corresponding textures and contexts that match, creating collections of imagery that he can draw from for his collage work. His process combines traditional artistic techniques with found materials, creating new compositions that explore modern identity through collected fragments.
Connect with Michael Manning
