Collage Artist Bette McIntire Puts Inspirational Spin on Daily News

When Laguna Beach artist Bette McIntire hears the familiar thwack of the L.A. Times on her driveway each morning, it’s a call to creative action.

Since making her first collage from the morning paper in 2007, McIntire has risen to the philosophical challenge of what she calls “re-imagining the news.”

“Out of all the problems in the world,” she explains, “the most severe is the lack of imagination. If you can’t see it differently, you can’t transform it. Starting with the front page, I cut out words from headlines, subheads and captions, and then move through the paper as a theme emerges. With words as their foundation, my collages are a kind of visual poetry.”

Words have moved McIntire throughout her life: as a reader, teacher, writer, and, now, artist.  Her hands-on art education began in 2002 while working at , when she took a bookmaking class at UC Irvine with local artist Martha Fuller.  The course introduced her to photo transfer, bindery and printing methods, as well as to the wonders of art stores, including a wide variety of paints, decorative stamps and—her favorite—handmade papers.

After the bookmaking class ended, McIntire continued to make books and experiment with the techniques and materials she had discovered. Around this time, she saw an exhibit of contemporary artist Robert Rauschenberg’s work at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which marked a turning point in her life.  Inspired by Rauschenberg’s newspaper collages, she created two of her own, giving one to each of her sons. She then began experimenting with creating collages around the daily news concept.

“I always thought of myself as a writer, not a visual artist,” she says. “But my husband thought the collages were really interesting.”

An artist himself, Glenn McIntire secretly took some of his wife’s new work along with him to an appointment with an art representative. The representative liked the pieces so much that she invited Bette to participate in a show with 10 other artists at the restaurant Bistango in Irvine.

Participating in that spring 2007 group exhibit, says Bette, “opened my eyes to the possibilities, and gave me the confidence to apply to participate in the .”

Five years later, she’s still a Sawdust exhibitor, living a life she never could have imagined that first summer. She recalls that in her first year as a Sawdust artist, she did not have a full-fledged booth. Instead, she exhibited 12 original collages along a wall and sold cards and small, limited-edition prints.

“I was thrilled when someone bought one of my originals on preview night,” she says. “Every year, I feel a growing fulfillment as people find meaning in my work and want to wake up to it each day in their homes.”

Since the beginning, McIntire’s repertoire has expanded. In addition to framed originals, prints, cards and small collages she calls “moments,” she also makes poetry blocks—children’s building blocks covered with fragments of poetry from old books. She also participates in Sawdust’s Winter Fantasy.

Over time, other projects have cropped up to take McIntire away from her solitary work selecting words and phrases, then positioning, rearranging, gluing, decorating and finishing each collage. Last summer, she met a rabbi who hired her to teach a multiday fall workshop for a group of Bar and Bat Mitzvah students at his Baltimore, Maryland school.  She was also selected as one of four mixed-media artists to be featured in a forthcoming how-to book by publisher Walter Foster.

In addition to juggling these projects and tending her Sawdust booth, McIntire has worked steadily toward a personal goal: completing one collage for each day of the year and reproducing the project in book form.

Looking out contentedly at the ocean view from her “factory”—the light-filled studio of the small Woods Cove cottage she shares with her husband—she reflects that her life now is a little like her collages.

“There is a freedom in doing something you never expected to do well. In the French tradition of bricoleur, I use what is at hand to make something new. My work begins with a suspicion: that an underground poem stirs within the day’s news. I never know where that will lead.”

To meet Bette McIntire and see her work, visit her at booth #243 at the Sawdust Festival through August 28, or visit her website at hoboworks.com. The Sawdust Festival is open daily from 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Laguna Beach residents with I.D. receive free admission on Thursdays after 5 p.m.