Collage and Decollage

I started making collages in the 1960's-- the earliest ones I remember were images of household items cut from magazines and glued onto construction paper to create new environments. These gave me a strong feeling of the magic of being able to create a three-dimensional space in two dimensions without regard for proportions or logic.

Later on I began making large, visually pleasing collages on boards, using images I found compelling, arranged carefully for a balanced composition. One of these was on a large board, six feet tall by four feet wide, nailed to the wall, called “The Big Board.” Eventually, I had to get rid of it, and other large collages, due to lack of storage space.

For about a fifteen year period, from the late 1970's to the early 90's, I concentrated on minimalist collages on the cardboard covers of pizza boxes. These often consisted of little else than a single image glued to the name of the pizzeria. Often, too, I would write words on the boxes, with pen or black marker. As time went on, I incorporated more and more written text. This collage series finally came to an end when I found out I could no longer eat wheat, which ended my pizza consumption and pizza box acquisition.

In 1998 I began making a new style of collage in which I would glue many pages from magazines and other sources on top of each other, creating a stack an inch or so thick. Then I would tear away parts of the images, creating a complex, layered collage, sometimes with a great deal of depth. This is technically decollage, because the images are created by tearing away, exposing what is underneath, rather than adding images to the composition. I usually just refer to them as collages, however, for simplicity.

These new decollages are now the primary style of collages I make, though recently I have also worked on a kind of collage that is influenced by the decollages-- simultaneously gluing on and tearing away images. Sometimes it's impossible to tell these two styles apart. For now, I am interested in both techniques. Both styles are slowly evolving.