Everyone's a Saint

So I had a spare four foot by four foot piece of particle board, and for a long time I'd been wanting to do a parody of those medieval paintings in which all the saints have golden halos.  I also had some neon pink spray paint, and I wanted to use my collage scraps as stencils.  I started work today.  These are mostly details:

For better or worse, this guy with the handful of grasshoppers is the center of the composition.  Then, at least so far, there are these other satellite saints:

 We'll see where this one goes.  It's hard to tell.

Swiss Cheese

Come out to Mag Hags II to see this baby in person.  It's like what would happen if Cy Twombly had a love child with the love child of Andy Warhol and Mark Rothko.  

Mag Hags II opens at Gallery A.P.E. on August 5th (2011), with a reception on August 12th (also 2011), in Northampton, Massachusetts, one of the coolest towns in America.  Come out and see the works of 14 bad ass collagers.  Also, this will be your opportunity to fawn over me as I pretend to be extravagently modest and anxious. 

Four by Four, USA

Work came to a stop about three weeks ago, about a week after I finished the...there's just no nice way to say this...the big diptych I'd been working on.  [not shown here, come to Mag Hags II on August twelth, Gallery APE, Northampton, MA, to see the work (and many other works from about 20 collagers) in person.  Until then, here's the scoop: a new direction:

I started with a full sheet of plywood, eight by four, and had the dude at Home Depot cut it in half.  Then I primed one half, thinking it needed to be primed, but I ended up loving the washy-ness of the primer so much that I didn't really want to collage, just paint and be done with it.  So I marked in the big shapes, still thinking they would be covered with papers, and liked it even more.  Then I took a break because I was conflicted: collage or paint?  Here's what I've learned about making collages on scales that are larger than a page from a magazine: as the pieces get bigger, a bunch of things change:


you realize that you need to be able to apply large amounts of glue rapidly


because, I think, the temptation is to use bigger pieces of paper (to suit the bigger surface) (like wearing big pants because YOU ARE BIG)


so you switch from brushing on glue with small brushes to using aersol glue, spray glue


which because of ease allows you to work faster, which

if you're comfortable working fast, allows for a bunch more spontaneity, maybe...


And really, with such a big surface, it feels right to get your arms in motion, swinging,


instead of the rather small and tense little motions 


you always end up making when fitting tiny pieces onto a small piece of paper. 




Anyway...this one is barely underway.  I could say it's finished and be confident about that, and people would "buy it" (nobody really buy it in this town), because there's tons of sketchy art floating around in this world that passes for finished work thanks to people like Cy Twombly, but I figured, what the hell, I might as well see where this baby can go.  


So we'll see.  Or I will.  If you want to see the finished work come out to Mag Hags II. 

Foliage: Big Decisions

Today I lifted the ban on paint.  I keep a mental set of rules, rules of conduct, moves I can and cannot make—I cannot make photo copies to extend images I want to use; I can only use what my mags provide me.  Until today, this afternoon really—I had a morning session, too—using paint was totally verboten.  Not allowed to use paint.  Definitely no paint. 

But then this afternoon I really wanted some areas to be yellow.  So I made them yellow.  "It's still mostly collage, Jono," I said to myself whilst listening to some bad radio out of Springfield, America's newest tornado alley.  

Anyhow, this piece, "foliage," the diptych companion to "flowers," used to be "the shark," but the shark died because it got stale.  It was ugly and I couldn't stand it.  I'm much happier with this, but obviously I have a tender spot for the shark because I'm letting wee bits of it show through...

flowers, foliage

So I almost completely white-washed the shark.  Couldn't stand it anymore.  Left some bits behind, but who knows, wouldn't be surprised if I obscured them, too.  As I told Rachel on the phone today (discussing upcoming Mag Hags II stuff), I'm covering up at least 70% of the work I'm doing these days.  Layers.  

Crappy pic of the diptych in progress: top half flowers, bottom half foliage/ex-shark.  Foliage and flowers: I love you, I need you.  Told Rachel I was working on a big diptych.  She said she hadn't heard that word in a while. Diptych.  Diptych.  Diptych.  This one's huge.

Shark Attack

OK, this is like 90% done.  Throw in a couple swimmers, some more blood, a couple beach balls, and I'll be golden.  What I called "ugly bastard" in the last post is now, for obvious reasons, "Shark Attack."  I can't believe I even hesitated to glue the shark down.  

  
Still totally chaotic, but perhaps the shark excuses the chaos?

Ugly Bastard

Rain, chronic rain.  I seem to be remiss this morning.  Last night, I was anti-social.  Went upstairs to my attic studio and set down the ground work (on half inch plywood) of this new piece.  Had been going through old work, bad old work, earlier in the day—been carrying a box of it around with me for too long—and found some really terrible but really large marker drawings and pen doodles.  I pulled out the ones I wanted and laid them on my bed.  Round nine p.m. I took them upstairs and started gluing them down to make this ugly bastard:

 
This morning, in the half-light of my room, I squinted at it on and off for about ten minutes.  Squinting allowed me to see only its main shapes, blurred the mess of details, told me where I need more contrast, more white, more black.  The main shapes are in.  It could go in any direction and probably will.  I post it now because it looks like a turd now.  But I am one hundred percent certain that it will clean up beautifully.  Mark my words.  Watch for the conclusion.  Give me about ten days and I'll make her shine. 

technique book

At some point I started naming the different collage techniques I've learned, invented, used.  For example, one of them is The Haircut.  This is when you trim someone's hair or head so that it deliberately looks ridiculous, cool, wrong.  Another technique is The Deliberate Reversal.  This is when, for instance, you cut out a crab, a lamp, a bed, and then, deliberately flip the image over and use whatever happens to be on the backside of the page.  I don't often use this move, though I do use a version of it for which I don't currently have a name.  Finally, for this post at least, there is The Pop-Up.  This is when, for instance, you take your X-Acto knife and trim along the crest of a hill, for instance, though it could be anything, and slide another image into that cut so that the image you slid in there appears to be Popping Up from behind the hill.  

 

I used a cousin of The Haircut, The Rough Trim, in this collage.  Notice the bathing dude in the bottom left-hand corner.  Notice how rougly I trimmed around him.  Anyway, I want to compile all the different techniques/moves and couple each one with an example of the move, and make a book out of it.  For what reason?  Dunno.

phase three

This one has been a real wrestling match: Monday I'm on top, Tuesday Collage is on top.  Wednesday I'm on top; Thursday Collage is on top.  It's like unsure humping between dogs.  Which dog will successfully mount the other dog?  Collage or boy?  Except here there are about 100 dogs and none of them are all that coordinated.  Still, sometimes an upper hand does get taken.  Here's me, lounging at the end of a session, thinking I was on top.

It's good to end a session feeling like a successful dog/artist.  Much better than leaving the studio with that bent head feeling.  The collage studio (at least mine) can be a mind boggling place, what with all the scraps everywhere and all the impossible ideas swirling around, some of which are actually on the collage and others of which are possibly slated to be on it.  Basically, this work can really exhaust a guy.  

So this is almost done.  For the one or two of you who are following my humping progress, this is the last phase that will appear on this blog.  From here on out it's just me and this collage.  A couple days more work and it'll be done.  It has to be.  I'm done with it.

phase two

This one got away from me.  My first round of gluing images down, I started making bold moves, strong compositional moves, moves that were not in the plan because plans change when you encounter the material.  Images from a magazine are not like paint, they're not plastic, you cannot stretch them or make them bigger, you can only make them smaller.  Long story short, when two hundred scraps are sitting in front of you, sometimes unexpected combinations reveal themselves...and you go with it.  So I made some unplanned moves, moves I didn't really understand, and decided I could deal with the problems they created later.  

At this point it was quite chaotic, so I continued to block out the "noisier" areas.  (No pic available.)  Even so, I am starting to realize that this collage will always be chaotic, that chaotic is what this one is, and that to undo that would essentially require me to completely re-cover all the work I've already done.  Oh well.  Back to the drawing board. 

phase one

Today is the first day of my new life.  I have been waiting nine months to work on this collage.  The desktop collage (previous post) was a warm-up for this one.  Right now I am methodically going through all of my National Geographic magazines, selecting potential images, my thoughts slowly warming up.

So, looking at this mess, and reflecting on the desktop collage, I realized that this piece will need a "sturdy" composition, some systematic architecture, some organized sub-structure to lend some control to a surface that will ultimately be chaotic.  The solution I am leaning toward is small squares, perhaps three inch squares.  Each of them, then will be its own composition within the larger composition.  So goes my thinking at this point anyway...

desktop collage (a study)

Really annoyed tonight, I made a collage directly onto the top of my desk.  When I finished (though it's not finished), I wrote this letter to fellow Bastardo Brother, D.P.:

So tonight's work taught me something about what I need to do to make the piece I've been developing in my mind since last summer. The very bottom layer needs to be pretty stable, like, all dark blues or something, and not too much information down there, just dark blues without too much happening. The layers then can build away from that dark blue, from zero information to information saturation. Basically, the under-collage that will inevitably show through in some areas needs to be there and be stable to help tie all the busy-ness together.

My plan is to cut out hundres of high information scraps, like busy flower beds, dress prints, any image that is very detailed and busy, and then to layer those images so that it's almost impossible to identify any single image, so that it all becomes a kind of cluster-fuck of pattern and image-density.

I also learned that the piece needs to be quite large so that it appears, from a distance, as a single unified block of an image, with no detail, just a unified brown block. I'm thinking, too, about increasing the density in the middle of the composition, like Guston's 60's abstractions with the dense middles. 

The full composition, as it is now... 

Tom Wesselman, Hal Hartley, Roy Lichtenstein

I've been watching Hal Hartley's movies, and sending facebook emails to some friends about his movies, about how off-kilter they are, and I've been getting back some insightful responses.  In case I make it sound like I've been doing some major, protracted thinking about this, the truth is that this business has only been on my mind for maybe a week.  In any case, tonight I was taking screen shots (screen grabs) of Hartley's movie, "Trust," you know, kind of looking at the scenes, the mise en scene, etc and so forth, and Tom Wesselman's classic Americana collages came to mind.  Here's a very famous Wesselman:

There aren't any obvious paralells going on.  I mean, there isn't anything in this image that screams HAL HARTLEY.  Nor the other way around.  But I think their works vibrate at similar frequencies.  The combination of staged trashiness, trashy Americana, and the curious mixture of delight and horror about their subjects...

(discussing the heroine's abortion in the diner)

Of course, the more obvious (pop art) comparison to Hartley would be Roy Lichtenstein.  Here's a very famous Roy:

The text in the thought-bubble might as well have been ripped straight from a Hartley film.  But of course, it's the other way around, historically speaking...

The Duffel Bag

It was my great honor and pleasure recently to design and help print the cover of a good friend, Luke Bloomfield's chapbook.  My signed copy says, "May many more covers follow.  Thanks dude."  You are most welcome, Luke.  Your book is awesome.  Here's the cover, letterpressed at Flying Object on a Vandercook 4T.

the pump house gang

I started altering books when I was 29, so that was, uh, lemme count backward, four years ago or so.  The first ones were books with dried beans embedded in them.  Then, years later, I got into embedding them with crushed cans.  Altering books is apparently "in" now.  Here's one that I haven't given away.

 The Pump House Gang 

Spaniels

The old man who lives next to me gave me this reproduction of hunting dogs, spaniels.  He used to raise them.  I said, thanks.  Then I took the painting home.  A couple days later I put pins in the dogs' eyes.  It was my birthday.  I felt entitled.  

 

poem-drawings

I made a bunch of poem drawings back in the 2005/2006 era.  They sat around, unnoticed, for a long while.  Then, last year, Action-Yes magazine published about six of them.  This is the first one I ever did.

 

an early classic

Here's a classic from my early period, circa 1999.  

 Marlboro Babies