I’ve always thought that 10% of what I create is pretty good. A fraction of that 10% is great. Not sure if this is a high number or not. I make stuff and what comes out is what comes out. Most of it is mailed and rarely seen again, so it’s not a practical goal to create greatness all the time. When great comes, it comes when I least expect it. There’s no plan or rhyme or reason. The pieces of paper simply converge in a way that works. Not sure if the pieces are attracted to one another or if put them together. It just happens. It cannot be forced. Because of this, failure doesn’t really matter. If things don’t work there’s no reason to get up in arms about it. There’s always more paper to put together. (Why am I thinking about Tetris right now?) Failure can be cut up again and again.
For the past few years, I’ve forced myself to make collages with paper. I do the same process over and over again. Every few months I can see how things have changed slightly. Even if you force yourself to do the same thing over and over, you will stray, and the compositions will change. In these strays you grow. Unfortunately this growth happens in spurts. It’s so easy to get stuck repeating the same collage. You know…here are my rectangles and squares, here is my person’s face, and here is my text…the same. These are the things I’m drawn to, these are the things I want to see.
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| Here is a large collage I sanded. It looks pretty good in a matte. |
After doing essentially the same process for a few years, I’ve started to look out for a few things. The biggest thing that annoys me is when things come out too linear, too straight, to up and down. I hate this so much. No matter how often I try and avoid this, it just happens sometimes. I think, maybe…possibly, I can pinpoint when and why this happens. Mostly, I start with a face or a person, or a word, first. I like a focal point. If I don’t tilt the item when I put it down on the sticky tape, things more or less line up after that, which makes for a boring collage. This is made even worse if I don’t cut the other pieces of paper erratically. When I put the pieces down on the cutting board I chop without making sure the pieces are straight. You end up with weird shapes this way, which makes for a better collage. Some of them, almost all of them are unusable, but if you end up with a nice piece of randomly cut paper in the almost shape of a dodecahedron, then it won’t look too linear. Fun surprises are always the goal. Strange shapes keeps me from being too lazy when I start to create.
The only way to fix this problem is too cut the collage into other shapes and go again, but that doesn’t always save it. Because I use crappy paper like 19th century paper, paper for kids to draw on, and magazines from the 1960’s, there’s a huge disparity in quality. This is mostly good, I like that mix. The problem is that mix can be jarring if it’s also too linear. Two wrongs make a bigger wrong. Nothing mixes together, nothing gets to know one another. It makes a firm line, a wall if you will. I hate this clash, I hate it so much. Unfortunately this clash has been with me the whole time I’ve been making paper collages. I call it “the line.”
And then I found sandpaper. Honestly, one of those sandpaper blocks fell from its position above my making space. It was in with the pens. It had been up there for years and I’d never thought to use it. Much like the tape transfer technique I played around with for years, this “new technique” randomly came to me. Why did no one tell me about sandpaper?
I started timidly with the sandpaper. Sandpaper kind of took away the line. It at least blended the different types of paper together, which made for a more cohesive creation. Most importantly, it made it look old. It looked something like Braque or Schwitters could have done a hundred years ago. Who cares about imitation, this is ME doing it. When things were going really well and I was sanding pieces of thick color paper, it came out looking like a Richard Diebenkorn painting, you know the ones with the squares and rectangles? It was a revelation. A problem had been solved!
And yes, a lot of people use sandpaper, it’s not new. And yes Ray Johnson used sandpaper. People loved to point out both of these things after I made my obvious realization and posted something about it, always helpful. Anyway, so I’ve continued to make paper collages and then sand them as much as possible. I’m going to continue in this way to see how things change over time. I’m going to play around with other grits and devices to distress the collage. The end goal, which has been my goal altogether, is to get as close to a roadside billboard as possible. You know the ones that have been neglected for years and years, baking in the sun, bits of paper flaking off…that’s a real inspiration. So yeah, like I wrote at the start of this, beginning with an idea of what you want never works out and yet I just described what I wanted to do in the future. I want a Kurt Schwitters through Ray Johnson / Diebenkorn sun burnt billboard like collage. One day I will get there, or not.
One problem I’ve discovered is that cheap black paper isn’t worth using. I’m talking cheap black paper found in 1960’s Life Magazines. When you put the sandpaper to that stuff, it smudges across the rest of the collage. It tends to muddy up the whole thing. Considering I like to use a lot of black and white when I make collages, this is a bit of a problem. The fix is better paper. Thick black paper, like paper found in high gloss art and fashion magazines, they smudge much less.
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| See the black dust over the image? No good. |
Another problem, I need to take this outside. My desk and surrounding area is lousy with paper dust. Some of that paper was made a couple centuries ago and might have some strange stuff in it. I might be patient zero for a new respiratory illness because of what I’m breathing in. I keep the fan going but that does little for the accumulation. It’s like a find brown snow.
A plus is the matching of the distressed collage to a frame. In the past few weeks I’ve done a lot of collages that I’ve put into frames and then given out to folks. All of these frames are recycled. Some of them came from thrift stores or left behind in old houses. They’re dirty, the mattes are often dotted with mold and random decay. I love this decay, I look for this decay. Putting one of my collages in one of these frames makes it look even older. Fake old! Although I like this effect, I did have to explain that it was meant to look like that recently. I handed them the framed collage and then felt like I needed to explain it. I pointed at the mold and dirt and said, “That’s meant to be there.”
So, to get ahead of things…what else can I do to these collages? In other words, what would Ray Johnson do?
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