I Made 336 Collages in 2019 and This One is My Favorite.

Spray-painted bingo card with tape transfers. 

90% of what I make is not good. Well, it’s ok, or just a repetition of what I’ve made before. It’s that one collage out of ten that I find interesting. It’s not a high percentage. That 90% ends up somewhere in the world, no idea if they like it or if they find anything interesting it. That’s the great thing about mailing most of your work away, you never see the failures again. I imagine someone opening one of my envelopes would say out loud, “Here’s another one of these pieces of shit.” I mean I get it; I’ve said that many times in the past when opening someone else’s work. I’d like to hear someone open an envelope and say, “Here’s one of the 90%.”

I’ve started to keep those one in ten collages after I realized I didn’t have much of my own work. The worst and the best all end up in someone else’s mailbox or lost floating around the world. Over this past year I’ve made and then scanned 336 collages, (I printed them all into a book) which means I’ve kept over twenty collages this year. I’m ready for that one man show that’ll never come.

This is one of those collages that I like. I really like it. I think it’s the best thing I made all year long and it looks nothing like what I’ve done before, which I guess is the point. There’s no faces in there, not even words…just color.

The process for making the card is not unlike the other 335. I bought a stack of bingo cards at a thrift store somewhere in the triad. I took a bunch of those and laid them out on a folding table in the backyard, and then spray-painted them. I’ve really made the effort to let some of the lines in the cards to peak out, not paint the whole thing one flat color, giving a little more texture to the “painting.” Not sure if I should call these paintings or not? Often, I call them “spray-paintings.” I then let them dry in the sun and then take them up in stacks upstairs. From there I go through old Life magazines to find words, colors, and images to make transfers from. I take that stack of “tape rips” to soak in the sink, wash off the back of the paper, and then I let them dry. Those go back upstairs and then I make collages from those transfers in groups of four or six. I add layer and layer and then tape over the top of them and add random images to a “worked” envelope and mail them to the network.

I love this one. I love the warm colors of 1960’s Life magazine transfers. It looks like a formless Kandinsky painting to me, which automatically disqualifies it from being unique, but who cares, it’s what I made. He didn’t make his paintings with tape, he did it with paint…so traditional.

What makes these stand out it is that I’m focusing more on putting colors together. For years I was mostly interested in clashing colors, or simply putting too many of them on top of each other. I did this for years, and years, and years, many of them with a smiling lady in the background or packaging for Velveeta cheese. Almost all the transfers I’ve made in the past couple months are mostly color, mostly the edges of ads for health care products or cigarettes. I think this is my favorite collage from this year.