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

WalMart Carts

Went to WalMart the other day and took these pictures of shopping carts.  Made some observations about customer behavior, basically about how lazy people are about putting their carts back into the cart corrals properly.  On hot days especially.    

This cart was abandoned way out on the outskirts of the parking lot.  The lot must have been full when the asshole who pushed this cart around parked his car in the "remote parking."

Just in case you think that people with multiple children that need to be strapped into the custom shopping cart attachment don't abandon their shopping carts on the outskirts of the lot, this picture proves you wrong.  Shopping cart negligence knows no race, creed or color.  

Even those customers that make the effort to bring their shopping cart back to the corral cannot be bothered to slide their cart into the next cart.  This behavior reminds me of those people that, when installing a piece of hardware or something that should be attached with four screws, decides that three screws will probably hold just fine.  

This is my favorite lazy bastard technique.  This technique (like many other similar techniques) shows that the butt-wad who left this cart knows, deep in his heart, that it's slightly despicable to leave a cart in the lot, and thus, to keep it from rolling around the lot in aimless abandon, he pops the front wheels onto one of the dry, mulched islands.  This kind of person is the kind of person that will throw up on your rug at a party and then, to make amends, will find an empty pizza box and hide the puke under it.   

  
This person is a post user.  These concrete posts exist only around the best spots, the spots closest to the store, and the customer that parks in them is among the laziest of WalMart customers.  She guns for the best spot because it's closest to the doors, and then, when she's done with it, she abandons the cart right there, probably in the exact location she finishes using it.  Putting it between to posts is the only concession to being unobtrusive.  I would not date this person.  

Finally, a very pretty picture of a cart corral that seems to be working somewhat properly, at least at this point.  There is no telling what happened after I snapped this pic, and in all likelihood, the situation only worsened.  Parking lot shopping cart systems are subject to the law of entropy, just like all other systems.  Probably ten minutes after I took this pick, some numb-nuts rammed a cart into the corral sideways and permanently blocked all other shoppers from housing their carts in the proper and respectable manner.  

Crowded Asian Cities

I bought a big ass painting of a ship a couple weeks ago, attempted a ships tossing about on the sea collage, fucked that up, re-primed the entire surface, slept on it for a few days, the idea, not the surface, although I also slept on a surface called my bed, and then, finally, sat down or, rather, squatted down to start work on my third and final big collage for my upcoming group show called Mag Hags. So far, this is what my original idea of "crowded Asian cities" has turned into. The top two images are details and the bottom image is the unfinished collage.  Estimated labor hours upon completion: 15.

Pink and Blue

Here are some details of "Pink and Blue."  It's dawned on me that maybe I shouldn't ever show complete works on here.  You know, keep people wanting MORE!