Collage Tag Archives

A little bit of everything, these are some random illustrations I’ve been making this past year. Some were gifts for friends, some were challenges made by friends, and others have no point at all. Still, it’s a side of me that doesn’t always get shown on this here web site. Enjoy!

I’ll be adding more as they are made!

This new series of mixed media collages is deeply inspired by recent happenings in my life, those of interpersonal conflict. Mistakes are inevitable in life, to be sure. And it is difficult for one person to never hurt another. But when communication breaks down, relationships get irrevocably damaged, and the monster inside each of us awakens, what are we to do?

I started making new collages several weeks ago. Now that my quarter of teaching at RIT is over, I finally have the spare time and energy to do so. It feels good. Images will be coming soon.

And, in many ways, I’m returning to image making with fresh eyes. Sure, the main focus of my work has not changed much since my thesis work several years ago, but I have learned much about art and also myself in even just the past few months.

Trust has always been a struggle. Granted, it’s never taken me long to complete a collage. Sometimes a few hours, sometimes over a week. There is no special technique or skill required to create them. But for even such small, simple works the process is daunting because all collage is, at its core, about destruction—the wholesale slaughter of images.

Here I have a magazine image. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. That’s why I harvested it from my pile of magazines in the first place. Do I use this? Do I slice it up? What if I make the wrong cuts? Do I paste it down? What if it’s in the wrong place? Do I color over it? Anything I do to it could ruin it forever, this small piece of perfection. It’s too good to use. It’s too good not to use.

Here I have a collage. It has some interesting things happening, small places of perfection amongst the whole. I fall in love with these elements. How could I cover them up or change them in any way? But the collage itself isn’t finished. It’s boring. I can’t leave it there.

But in order to continue I must destroy what I’ve already done. I have to hack away and bury the things I love with the hope that something new and better will come of it by the end. The prospect is frightening.

Collage is inherently about loss. I feel sadness and doubt with every action as I am always finding something new to love, a little zone of comfort and happiness within the image and then am forced to ruin it forever with only the vaguest of notions that something better is out there.

Art is a lot like life.

Not all of these collages are good… but they are all new. Keep an eye on this post—more works will be coming.