Neon Narratives

This summer in the studio we took a deep dive into the neon, black and white textured color scape of Roger Mello’s work. Inspired by the exhibition Fuzuê! Invention & Imagination in the Art of Roger Mello, we invited guests to create their own books using neon papers and collage materials.    

Materials

Folks had the option to pick from five colors for their books: blue, green, pink, black, and orange. We cut paper down to six by nine inches, folded the papers in half, and used a long reach stapler to bind the spines of the books. You can add as many pages as you like, but for this project we used two sheets of folded paper per book.  

An assortment of collage and mark making materials were used for this project: neon and metallic colored pencils, metallic gel pens, glue sticks, scissors, and collage paper.  

For the collage paper we offered bright colors alongside unique black and white texture scans of objects that we made in-house. We wanted all the books to have a visual connection and through limiting the color palette and providing project specific textured collage papers we were able to achieve visual continuity.  

Black and White Papers 

One aspect of Roger Mello’s work that stood out to me is the flat bright neon colors sitting in stark contrast with these wonderfully three-dimensional black and white textures. Mello uses plastic bags and house paint to achieve these deep textures. Without providing plastic and paint, we wanted to capture this unique element of his work. 

We replicated this effect by scanning materials to help us achieve the textural collage element of Mello’s work. Materials collected from the studio included yarn, packing plastic, cling wrap, ink splattered collage papers, and tin foil.  

Black and white photocopies were made of these various items. We found ourselves being playful, curious, and excited while sifting through the materials and pushed our experimentation further by dragging several items across the scan bed as the scan was being captured. This created unnatural and funky warps that we enjoyed seeing on the copies. 

These papers became inspiration for natural formations. Many guests transformed these scans into mountains, dirt, rivers, ponds, trees, and clouds while others explored patterns and design.  

Display 

These books needed a home, and we wanted to create a display wall that was accessible and easy for folks to flip through other guest’s creations while inviting further visual inspiration.  

Fellow art educator Meghan Minior sketched up a design after flipping through Roger Mello’s book, Charcoal Boys, and the studio team worked collaboratively to install the wall using cut paper to form the flames and rocks. 

We did not want to distract from the design, so I created paper pockets by folding strips of paper in half and stapling them to the wall using the same color paper that the team used to create the backdrop. It was exciting to see the neon narratives popping out of the flames and poking out behind the rocks.  

On Inspiration  

The final piece for our project was exploring how other artists use neon in storytelling.  

Literacy educator David Feinstein helped us select a wonderful variety of titles to place on the tables as further inspiration.  

Check out the Neon Narrative Booklist to help ignite some colorful summer inspired fun!