Four Panel - In a Row

Four Panel - Square

Two Panel -- Final!

This collage is finally finished. Some of the tearing went down as far as the first layer-- and below! Someday one of them will go all the way into the wall-- maybe through the wall and into the next room! When I can figure out how to do that, I will!

Two Panel Part 5

I recently made more progress on this collage, and I thought it was about done, but now that I look at it, I can see that it is not. That's how it goes. But it's getting there!

Two Panel Part 4

I didn't work on this for awhile, but now I've gotten back into it. Sometimes the time is nice, time away from something. If nothing else, that helps you not to fear it, not to fear the process. And there is nothing to be afraid of here. What's gone is gone. Well, I guess the one worry is always going all the way to the back-- tearing into the back where the cardboard is. I've gone right through the back, on occasion. Someday I'm going to cut through the back of one of these and go right through the wall, into the next room!

Two Panel Part III

Well, it continues to evolve. Some might say it's getting worse. But, you know, things always get worse before they get better.

2 Panel Continued

Well, pretty much all of the first version is gone! Looks like Audrey Hepburn showed up, for awhile, hi Audrey! Don't get too attached to her, is my advice.

In Progress 2 Panel

This is a 2 panel collage in progress. Sometimes in the course of tearing away at the images, I get kind of sad about what has to go, so I thought I'd take a few pictures of some collages while working on them. Often, like with this one, I'll get to some point that I like it, but I know I have to go on. So I'll let it sit around for awhile so I can look at it like it is, temporarily. What is there will most likely inform what comes next.

About Love

This collage, from 2001, is one of my favorites. I don't know why I don't make more square collages, it's a good shape. It was under consideration to be used for a Fugazi album cover-- and being square it would work pretty well. I wish they would have used it, that would have made me happy. Or, I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't have made me happy. It's hard to know.

WORK

I think this collage is titled "Work," possibly because it says "Work" in the top left corner, or possibly because it was a lot of work to make. This is the deepest collage I’ve ever made, about four inches deep. No, six inches. I'm not sure. It kind of seems gimmicky, this deep, so I haven't tried to duplicate this particular process, which I don't want to talk about. That would be too much work in itself. Anyway, people seem to like this one, I think because it reminds them of a diorama. There are diorama elements in all the collages, but I usually try to create depth and space with images as much as with actual depth. This one is so deep that it gets dark in there. You can barely see this inside.

Horse Collage

This is a traditional collage, one of several similar ones I made on wood. I liked this one a lot. I think I sold it at the collage show I had at the Flying Fish Gallery. Whenever I see a picture of it, I miss it.

collagedecollage

This is the first of the layered decollages I ever did, in 1998. I had this thick piece of corrugated cardboard packing material, and I felt like I could make it into something, so I cut away a rectangular cavity and then laid in images, mostly old photographs and magazine pages. After I built it all up and weighted it down and let the glue dry, I started cutting away at it. The middle goes really deep, all the way through the back. I always really liked this one, and ever since, I've been trying, unsuccessfully, to replicate it. Somehow, I can't come up with anything with quite the same quality, but I keep trying. In the meantime, I've developed some other, similar, but different, styles of decollage… and collage.

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.