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.
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.
