Mixed Media Tag Archives

We had an Artist Trading Card convention across the street from us at work this past weekend. It was very cool to see have the people from the convention come over and get all excited over art supplies! I started getting into the action and made a bunch of cards to trade away. Sadly, most of them never got documented, but here are a few of my later ones.

Some of these have already been take, but more will be coming as I make them!

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.

This was made during my first quarter of grad school following the completion of the Bedroom Box. My intention was to make a whole series of these boxes, but I didn’t have the time to devote to the project.

Any similarities with a certain “E.T.” movie were completely unintentional.

I had forgotten all about these when I found them hiding in a box. I made them 2 years ago when I first started making these collages.

I was experimenting with materials—different paint media exhibit different behaviors on magazine print. For example, watercolors are repelled by the ink on the magazine page until the page itself becomes saturated. I noticed this with the image of Ray Charles which I thought made him look creepy as hell.

I couldn’t bring myself to use it in any of the collages I made that summer. In some ways I felt it was a complete work in itself but it’s probably more accurate to say I was just attached to how it came out and didn’t want to “ruin” it by trying to use it in something.

I was hoping the former was true but it seemed stupid at the time to consider that one little torn scrap of a magazine page a “finished work” so I made the other three with the idea that making a series of them might evolve into something. But nothing did.

And when I moved out of my apartment that fall I packed them into a box and promptly forgot about them.

These two small works (models? constructions? thingies?) were made with the intent that they’d have a role in a future box (like this box) but those future boxes were never made so they are currently sitting alone on a shelf collecting dust (as opposed to the boxes that actually got made that are sitting on a shelf collecting dust). (more…)