Collage

In collage, pieces of ordinary life are taken out of context and reassembled in combination with other things to create a new context, and through that a new meaning. Ambiguity of time and place and relationship can be found through this combination of unrelated objects or images.

In January of 2007 I took out my boxes of bits and pieces of paper, labels, old photographs, match boxes, old postcards, cut out puppets, things I have been collecting for decades. I spread them across the dining room table and set to work. Using a scanner/printer that can make archival prints I cloned some of the elements from my collection and worked on several collages at the same time, using some of the same pieces multiple times, creating a series, and working with variations on a theme. In a sense, the collages are more a visual stream of conscious, an immediate response to color, form, image and context, than a paintings can be, purely by virtue of the technique. My paintings are taking longer and longer to finish, anywhere from two to six months, sometimes even longer, and if I want to change something in a painting it requires many layers of repainting. The elements that I am using in the collages are much the same as the elements in my paintings, the difference being that I can collect them and combine them rather than having to paint each part from start to finish, so that the transformation is more immediate. I like the fluidity of evolving images that can emerge and change within a day instead of taking weeks or months to metamorphose. I tend to leave them in this state of movement for as long as possible, at times for weeks, enjoying the play of the images as I make minute adjustments. Then when I feel the time is right, I glue them down and start again.

The current price for a collage is Euro 500, unframed. I have not priced them according to size.

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