An Old Collage Becomes a New Collage

The collage I sent to Creative Thing (Cypress CA - USA)

The above collage I sent to Creative Thing in Cypress California. He was kind enough to scan the “oversized” card and share it online. It’s not quite 8 x 10. It’s a child’s keno card that I found a nice stack of at a thrift store. I really like the heft of those cards and I try to buy them every time I find them.

The process that I used to make the card was something I’ve just started to play around with. Right now I’m reading a biography of Marcel Duchamp and I was a bit influenced by some of his ideas. Basically I’m recycling a bunch of old analog collages that I’ve created and make something new with them. I’m recycling the old to make something completely new. Here is the process that I used to make the card.

1.      I went through a bunch of my old collages. These are ones that people scanned and posted online. They could have ended up anywhere in the world. I took the color collages and then save them as a monochrome image.

2.      Using paint, the only digital editor I know how to use, I smashed a bunch of these old collages together. I think for this image I used about five or six old collages. I cut down the size of a few of them, flipped them, and reshaped them. I tried to “create drama” by having each one of them crash into the next.

3.      The main goal was to overload the senses…make the eye search for something it recognized. My eye always goes to the LIFE magazine logo all over the image. This is a nod to Richard Canard’s LIFE poetry. The lady in the top right corner is from the first collage I ever made that someone scanned and posted seven or eight years ago.

4.      I printed off a bunch of these smashed together collages on different types of 8 x 10 paper. Some of the pieces of paper were really colorful, it was nice where the color would pop out in between the black ink. It was a random exercise. This particular collage was printed on a dull yellow sheet of paper.

5.      I glued the printed off collage to the hard cardboard backing and cut off the overlapping edges. The final step was to add some marker, crayon, stamps, and some stickers. I think I’m going to do the whole process over with the “new” image. Hopefully someone will scan the result when it reaches its new home and I’ll start it all over again.