1. Please, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you.
Hello! My name is Oliver Wiegner, i live and work in Berlin, Germany and run the design studio ICE CREAM FOR FREE.
Since my childhood i’m addicted to pictures, drawings, forms and colours and i’m really lucky to live out this passion with my job.
I love to bring organic and geometric forms together and try to create something contradictive. Making collages, analog or digital is a pretty good way to provide this.
2. Recent, current or future projects you are involved in that you would like to share with us?
At the moment i’m totally into making new collage works for the next Weird Show in New York. It’s going to be a kind of Mickey Mouse porn.
3. What kind of things do influence your work?
Mostly forms and colours i notice everywhere. This can be on art or design blogs just as someone or something outside without any art context.
As a designer you are doomed to gaze like a maniac on anything what passes your face. And music is always well established in the working process.
Currently i listen to Valtari from Sigur Rós. Over and over again.
4. How is your normal process of collaging? (idea or commission, where do you get your materials or find your images, which is your cutting technique, best way you have found to paste, where do you work and how, and very important: what do you do with your scraps)
I really love old and well thumbed magazines and books. Especially porn, children’s books and everything with animals inside. I just bought a bunch of children’s colouring books.
For cutting i’ve used a ordinary scalpel until now, but to be honest cutting is not one of my favorite activities. That’s why i plan to hire some students to cut my material. But because i don’t trust anyone, i’m experimenting with an automatic and more accurate technique to get a more clear and sharper defined result. And to stop cutting by myself.
Glue is a question of concept and depends on what i want to come up with. The last works i did got a more rough demolished look and i used wallpaper paste to intensify this. Right now i want a more clean expression and i use spray mount.
And scraps…i collect all my scraps, but i think this doesn’t make any sense. I always think „Uhhhh…maybe i will need this scrap eventually some day…“. But i never need it.
5. Wich is your latest discovery in the collage world? What advice can you give to a collage beginner?
Today i saw some awesome stuff from Harold Diaz on the Weird Show Blog. But that are not really big news for the Weird Show Blog.
There is enough lovely art, do ugly art. If you can’t do ugly art, do lovely art.
6. What do say your friends/family about your collage work? And, what do you do when you are not working on art?
My mom always totally don’t understand what i do, but loves it anyway. It’s her job. I stopped asking her.
When i don’t work, i think i have to work. The remaining time i drink beer together with my girlfriend to stop thinking about work.
7. Would you like to ask anything to John Baldessari? Shoot.
Until Max sent me this questions i thought he is doing this perfumes. I googled him and noticed that some of his works are looking like mine. Why?
http://www.icecreamforfree.com
