Assemblage thoughts...

Assemblage art always fascinated me when I was at college. Although these images I'm doing here are quick studies/sketches and ideas and not final pieces where I intend to fully render original art, the process I'm going through is very similar to assemblage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(art)

Instead of found "real" objects I'm using interesting or meaningful un copyrighted photos/non art from the web or my personnel collections, messing, sketching on top of or reworking to bring them together for a different intent. Digital art lends itself very well to this process and now with the amount of visual data being thrust at us via this medium every day its surprising more assemblage techniques and discussions are not more prevalent. Maybe it’s because as artists we are hung up on copyright or original art ideals.

Is assemblage “real art” if it’s not completely created from scratch?

If you want to display a can of beans in your image then where do you draw the line of re-creating it from scratch or the fact that using a real can of Heinz beans is important because doing so has some social context that matters more than the skill needed to replicate it?

Here’s some more assemblage related artists/work:
http://www.understandingduchamp.com/
http://www.marshabalian.com/sculpture/index.html
http://www.danlevin.com/recent.html
http://www.mariannelettieri.com/Site/About.html

Ted Gall appears to “assemble” his sculptures by creating a large library of his own assets to create all his outstanding visuals. That seems like the ultimate solution:
http://www.sfstation.com/images/ev/13/5213c.jpg

Or maybe I'm just trying to justify not taking the time to paint and draw like I used too...