Cutting Circles into Rectangles

For the past two years I’ve forced myself to make collages in almost the same way. I did this to see how things might change over time, and although they have, this process has gotten a little stale. The process I’m referring to here, are my paper collages, mostly blocky, mostly leaning on old and rotting paper. Since I’ve done things in this way for so long, the process takes little to no time, or even thought. It’s almost an assembly line of image making. I have so many of them that I’ve stopped scanning all but the larger ones. It’s been fun, but I’ve been feeling the need to change for some months.

The main problem I had with them, is that they were almost exclusively rectangle. A rectangle is a fine and generous shape, but it wasn’t keeping my interest. In each collage was a face, maybe a short phrase or sentence, and a lot of squares and small rectangles positioned around. One in ten I thought was good, which isn’t a bad average. Since I’m a mail-artist, I mail everything instead of staring over, a process that can sometimes inhabit growth. I don’t look at a subpar image and say to myself, “Toss it,” instead I say “Mail it.” Considering what I often get from folks, I doubt anyone can tell the difference. I always send something original, something worked. Never do I send images torn from an old Cosmopolitan magazine. Sorry, I had to get in a slight there. Original and ok, instead of effortless and subpar, is fine by me.

I forced myself to change things up.

I wanted to start with my well-worn process, and then try and subvert it. I made the usual rectangles but then I cut into long pieces, short pieces, and into shapes from various tools sitting on my desk. With the pieces, I fixed them into shapes, using the negative space of the cardboard backing to make a more dynamic creation. While this is nothing new to the world of collage (who cares?) it was new to me. In my mind, I was thinking about those Hans Arp chance paintings, but you know…with things touching. What ended coming out looked like the 1920’s to me, someone like Braque, less dynamic but at least similar in tone.

I really leaned into “messing up” the pieces that I had put together. What I made was quite different than what I had been making, which excited me. I have a new path forward, at least for a little while. When I looked at what I had created I wasn’t indifferent like I so often am, I was excited about the possibilities of what I could add to future creations.

Below are four images. I posted the image first, and then commented on what I see in the creation. Nothing like a fun writing exercise to keep the image making mind moving.  

 

In this first image, I’m really focusing on the little one’s eye. The baby is off to the right, and not the center of the piece. It’s not the whole face. There’s two circles of varying sizes in the image. Off to the far left is a circle that has been removed, this is my favorite part. In this collage I can really see the scrapes across the old pieces of paper. Anything that looks old, looks like it is deteriorating is always more interesting to me than something that’s bright and shiny and new. For years, I’ve been trying to get this effect in my work. For this effect, I used something that looks like a toothbrush with metal bristles. No idea how it appeared on my desk or what it’s supposed to be used for. 

 

The second image is solid. It’s slightly larger than the first, 8x10. What I like about this is exactly what I started to hate about all of my old collages, this one has movement. The lines are going in every direction. There’s no real focus here, at least not in the overall image. What I see second are the original collages that I made and then cut up. There’s an old picture from Ebert Street in there. There’s an old Winston-Salem postmark at the top. In the center are a couple line drawings that I cut out of an antique children’s book from the 1950’s. Around that image are a bunch of pieces of heavy paper I spray-painted years ago and stuck in a disused corner of my garage. Technically, it’s taken years for this image to take shape. That big black circle, the one in the top right, came from a Life magazine in the 1960’s. There’s something about cheap paper that’s magical. High gloss magazines are almost impossible for me to work with. The paper is too heavy, the color is bound to the paper. I’m always looking for the look of a fading billboard on the side of a disused highway.

 

The red is the true winner in this one. It’s bright enough to give personality to the composition, but worked enough to have it blend in with everything else. This “blending” is something that “distressing” the images helps. If your collage comes from a lot of different sources and decades, everything from magazines, coloring books, books, then the paper and ink quality is going to be different. Sometimes these differences can cause a composition to clash. When you take a wire brush or metal device to clashing images, you bring them together through negation. For this one, the destruction is tying the collage together. There’s some blue crayon in there too.

 

The last one is my least favorite. It’s the most like what I’ve done for the past couple of years. What we have here is a rectangle collage made of parts from the same source. I assume this is from an old magazine considering how the scrapes cut into the paper. The man image is a man’s face, with a woman’s face beside of his, and then two sets of arms on the bottom of the collage. What makes this look different from what I normally create, are the two breaks. In the top right I have punched out a couple circles and replaced them with smaller ones. The middle replacement, has a lot of little pieces in it. From what I can tell, that middle circle has seven different pieces of paper in it. The size of the circle is a nickel. There’s some stuff there, some things to look at in a tiny space. There’s only two pieces of paper making up that top replacement circle, the main being some old construction paper. The square on the far left is covered in some blue ink I normally use for rubber stamps. I should have rubbed out more of that ink. It’s an ok image, nothing I’ll keep.

Moving forward, I’m going to continue working this process. Maybe I work this method until I get completely bored with it? I’m excited again.