The Collage of Life

Modern life is a collage of the real, the perceived, and the imagined. Everyday walking down the street I am deluged by advertisements, panhandlers, noises, smells,. Words and images pop up out of the sidewalk like flowers, people talking, moving living. The intangibles are there as well : emotions, hopes, prayers, and attractions. These all swim around me in the sea of life as I go about my day.
The collages I make are an attempt to capture a moment in time, a thought , or a group of thoughts on one subject. Often I start out with a simple painting on a piece of board. This is building the interior of the painting. Much of the time, the things going on within each of us is very simple and primal, very similar to the blobs of paint that comprise the bottom layers of these works. Next I build up the surface with brightly colored oil pastels and methodically placed pencil marks. The pastels add color and life to the open areas and also create a psychadelic and exciting field of vision. The pencil marks are often surrounding the oil pastels to unify and balance the bold color with obsessive line and precision. At this point I usually apply a collage element, bringing the painting into the world of narrative and dialogue. Up until this time I usually just create without much ambition as to what it is I’m trying to make. For this reason, many of the works have a zen quality underlying the more tangible statement of the collage elements. Words and numbers can serve to either de-mystify, or even further subvert a direct read of what the piece is about. The final layer of these collages is usually a matte medium finish to unify the different media and create a flat viewing plane; this layer also makes the works much more durable and archival.
The work is both public and private, obsessive , and wild. It is influenced by growing up as a punk teenager in the nineties as well as studying at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Mountians, traveling

flashdance

Dancing outside on the street for free with so many other happy people is life afirming.
Dance is beautiful.
Music is love.
Everyone should dance right now.
Doit! Dance right now

Life/Nurture

This morning
all plans changed
in the hospital
holding nothing in my lap
while you hold your belly
The grandmother holding a baby in the seat behind me
she knows the slant of baby-backs without trying
gently rocking new life into being
how do we hold what is precious?
How do we let it go?
Later, in the garden I am soaking the plants with the hose
I wonder at its phallic spray
giving its fizzy white water to the thirsty dark earth
and the little plants that grow up
shooting happily towards the sky in all thier greeny newness
in the shimmering ten o clock springtime morning I sit
transfixed by life and death
watching the steam rise up off the planter boxes Sean built
out of leftovers
I think of him in that afternoon with the whirring saw
and the orange power cord running through the kitchen window from the yard
he seemed happy to be of use
This morning I watched your husband wrap a tiny
seedling
in newspaper
its little leaves shaking, quivering beneath his long brown fingers
carefully he wrapped the baby plant up and packed it into his satchel
for a moment I caught his eyes
watery brown pools of possibility
like the wet watered earth of our garden

Beeswax is the new Black

The reason why I create collage, is because at this point, I feel like it is honestly the closest thing to mimicking my actual experience of the world. Its the way images come to me in my head and they live there, pasted in like photos from the magazine of the world. As they mix with all the other stuff in there, To-do lists, smells, memories, ideas, toasters, and existential conundrums they become coated, torn up, reconstited, masticated, and otherwise incorporated into the soup of magic that is my image bank. That is why I love beeswax. (should I explain this further, or just leave it as a dangling, ganglia, usuported statement, and then explain it off as poetry? No, I should explain.
Beeswax is the perfect final coat for this collagey business Ive been cooking up. Its organic, and smells good, its seductive and delicious, it invites touch.

This is my first try...

Honestly I feel a little lost. I always feel this way at the begining of the quarter. I am so excited about making some kind of fashion show at the end of the quarter, but thats pretty far away. Sean says he might help me send some of my painting designs to "cafe press" print them on T-shirts and then use the t-shirt material to make the clothes for the Fashion show. Another idea was to make all the clothing out of white material, then project my 2-d designs onto the clothes. Robbyn seems to like the drawings I did on the clear leader that I worked on for the other group studio practice class I'm taking (intro to film and video) so I thought I might incorporate that in somehow. Special thanks to my new friend (the girl with very blonde hair in our class who's name I don't know yet) for helping me get inspired by noticing the skirt that I'd made just before class yesterday. I really apreciate the positive feedback, it helps move things along!