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...
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