The pieces start with a pencil drawing on card stock. I use a ruler, though I don't necessarily have to use a ruler. I could free-hand it.
Then all the lines get cut with an X-Acto knife. Here: not all the lines have been cut. You'll also notice that I put a pink mark on each piece. That's so I know which side faces up when I start to reassemble all the pieces. This work is heavy on the front-end conceptualization.
Then I rifle through my magazines and choose some pages that I might want to use. Because I want the compositions to be angular and "un-friendly" (to some extent), I am also thinking that I want to (to some extent) choose images that will amount to unexciting and/or muddy palettes. The piece in this post isn't all that muddy or unexciting. Oh well. One must break any of his own rules whenever he feels like it. For me, there's no point in making my own set of rules if I'm not also willing to break them when the mood strikes me. I'm not a robot.
Then, piece by tedious piece, I reassemble the drawing...
Rubber cement is involved
Magazines pieces are glued onto template pieces and then the finished pieces are glued (in this series) onto a masonite backing. It's slow-going, exacting work that demands patience, good light (no shadows), and sharp blades.
Partially finished work with some notes about remaining decisions to make (notes that, btw, I didn't follow to a T).
This one, which I've called "Utah 4 U: I Love Driving," is actually one of the friendlier pieces in the series. The composition isn't that off-balance and the colors are pretty nice. The general idea, though, is to make compositions that walk the line between almost terrible and really terrible, off balance and very off balance. Etc. Again, this piece isn't the best example, but the pieces also work to skew perspective, to make it hard for the viewer to know what he or she is looking at, to know what to think about it, to decontextualize the source images so that they cannot be identified/become mere color or to at least obscure the context enough to make it difficult to identify the source image. With this piece, however, I wanted to make a friendlier piece that doesn't alienate the viewer quite so much as the previous one:
But even this one is friendlier than the one that came before it. Each small piece takes about seven hours, and I've only made three so far. My ideas change as I go.
