Fred Free (b.1962), USA
Fred Free received Bachelors’ degrees in architecture and fine arts from Rhode Island School of Design. He made the usual childhood collages and at RISD he took a couple of collage studios. After that  he concentrated on architecture and didn’t really get back to collage as an art in itself until he was almost 30. However, for Fred Free “the collage has always been there; underlying everything as a way of thinking and composing”.

What attracts Fred to collage is the potential for re-use of graphics, styles and images from previous eras, the juxtaposition of items that were never meant to be together, the use of random words and text bits as a new kind of poetry and their potential for spontaneous creative explosiveness. The process is the most important/interesting/inspiring part of any project, “in the sense that I  am working/living/experiencing something in the moment. Like taking a roadtrip - an adventure that is more about the journey and less about where one ends up.”

He doesn’t believe there is just one collage aesthetic. However, he often encounters a kind of unfortunate stereotypical idea about what a collage is - the “ransom note thing” containing lots of cut-out magazine heads with black lines over the eyes. “There are as many ways to approach collage as there are ways to go about painting, if not more given the myriad of materials available and inherent in the process.”