Tom Lawrence - Trash These Chairs - Cut & Paste Illustrator
www.trashthesechairs.com - Traditional mixed media collage
Trash These Chairs is a cut & paste illustration studio founded by Tom Lawrence in 2006. Tom combines traditional collage methods with street rubbish and currently operates out of a spare room from his apartment in Amsterdam. Tom was born in and bred in London and studied Graphic Design at the University of Lincoln, England. He moved to Amsterdam in 2009 to be with his girlfriend and shortly found work as a graphic designer.
About the collage illustrations:
In his daily life, Tom is a conceptual designer. But after work he pushes the boundaries to progress his passion of collaging onto recycled formats. His work is an eager mix of experimentation and mistakes balanced with careful composition of ephemera and street rubbish. ‘I like to recycle, I feel it’s important. I see a lot of waste in major cities and there’s so much value in the stuff that most people don’t even notice. I save a lot of money on base materials which allows me to experiment very freely in my work. If I break the canvas I’m working on, I just walk outside and soon enough I’ll find something similar to work on.’ He also works on other formats including children’s hardback books. He calls these creations Gluebooks and uses them like visual sketchbooks. When they are finished they are very original and personal.
(10) Serie: Transmission - ‘Lafayette 2’ / 2010
The transmission series was started after finding a 70’s mail order catalogue in a recycling bin; the content was amazing, every page had full page colour images and was very well photographed. Not long ago he started experimenting with the reverse sides of large printed adverts from the street and picked some good colourful crops for the boards.
17cm x 23 cm – hardboard
€ 55 a piece - €145 set of 3
(11) ‘Hagri Mitri’ / 2007
A mix of found screenprinting textures, Japanese newspapers from a local Toko and some photocopied imagery from a previous project. Tom; ‘Prior to this collage I made a lot of minimal compositions, this piece started as more of a mistake, but turned out pretty good.’
50 cm x 40 cm – canvas
€ 215 a piece
(12) Series: Plane Janes - ‘Spring Casual Wear’ / 2010
’I spend a lot of time preparing and choosing backgrounds, I decided after trying a lot of compositions that some backgrounds were actually the main feature; this was one of them. This background is a dress pattern from an 80’s womens magazine found one evening on Queensday in Amsterdam.’
50 cm x 60 cm – canvas
€ 220 a piece
