I'm A Serious Collage Artist Now!

 I have no proper art education, either in history or application. I learned about DADA by writing about poetry. From that the world opened up and I’ve tried to make connections ever since. As for proper background, training as it were, in the physical creation of “art,” …nothing. I doodled as a kid. Finding out about DADA mixed with the D.I.Y. ethic of punk rock, inspired me to create stuff without any expectation. The work you create is because you saw something through, because you had an idea and now a thing exists. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, it probably isn’t.

An Ode To Japanese Copiers

Miles Davis and a "dancer"

It took a couple of years of swimming in the mail-art network before I stumbled across the tape-rip method. It just happened one day when I was playing with old magazines and tape. You know, making tape transfers and them putting them together over and over again. I loved doing this. I love doing this. Not only is the activity of creating fun, but I thought I was creating something unique. The process wasn’t new but it was new to me. This was my creation with minimal ingredients. It was my three chord punk rock song.

In my head I’ve wanted to expound my creating knowledge. I thought about going through some books about collage or painting or even drawing. I might have even bought a few at thrift stores. I’d thumb through them and that was pretty much it. Forcing a new technique didn’t work for me. If my process in creating collages or broadsides or board books changed, it happened over time. A small impulse would bring about a massive change, months later. Cut out six months of discovery and compare the old with the new, and clearly something changed. Without consciously saying “I’m going to do something different,” I ended up doing something different. No reason to force it. I’m playing the long game here. I’m not going to stop making my “three-chord images” anytime soon, even if only a handful of people care about them. I have no ambition except to make the next thing.

Let’s back up. On social media I’d see artist after artist sharing their collages. A lot of these fall into specific categories. I’ve made things for long enough that I can identify their source material and technique quickly. The most “ordered” of these paper collages were interesting to me. I could see how they came together, I knew where they got their materials, and could even understand their thought process, but I couldn’t imitate them. Here I was slightly ambitious. I challenged myself to work solely with paper to create a slick collage that someone would charge hundreds of dollars for. Can you believe that? People actually get that much for a collage. Send me your address I’ll mail you one for free. 

Throat punch!

MeeMaw Hanging with Communists

 

My paper collages sucked for years. They were always too linear. Being too linear is always my problem. Nothing came together until very recently when I felt like a had breakthrough. I made a large stack of tape collages and then sitting beside of those, I had an equally large pile of paper ones. It just happened. I kind of cheated since I used tape…sort of.

Every once in a while I’d run across leftover industrial materials, stuff from stores. You know, long rolls of stickers that stores put prices on? I put a bunch of those together and then stuck bits of paper to them. Gluing them together never made sense, taping them down…did. I cheated. Tape forever! Using old paper ripped from free books gave the collages that “professional” look. Not sure how to describe what I mean by “professional.” Uh, the look of the collage big-shots (I guess that’s a thing) who’s stuff ends up in important places. Important places like sandwich shops in Brooklyn. Clearly I don’t have the language to describe the “nice” paper collages I see online, stuff that could have easily been done over 100 years ago. Braque, Hoch, etc. I did a pile of these really quick and I think they’re pretty cool. I’m going to make a bunch more in a similar fashion and then I’ll work to making them more in my style. There needs to be a snarky joke in there somewhere. These are too serious, too direct, too unambiguous. I’ll fix that. Confusion is next! 

The family doing ATM.