Cutting: My images are dissected with cuticle scissors and an exacto knife. I find the act of cutting and separating the image from its original context to be very satisfying and challenging at times. It satisfies me as much as any brushstroke or line. Line used to be very important to me. It was in the line that I could lose myself, now it’s in the cutting.
Description: I’ve always found my work to be especially difficult to describe though others have called it surrealist or narrative collage. Each piece becomes its own frozen drama or illustration for a story, reflecting a visual manifestation of psychological, emotional or spiritual states. The titles of my work are of particular importance adding a frame of reference for the viewer.
Imagery: The imagery I use is culled from a wide range of sources including old encyclopedias, book covers, medical texts, children’s books, technical manuals, ornithological volumes, antique paper dolls and photographs to name a few. Ideas: I never start out with any kind of agenda. It’s really my lexicon of images that gives me my ideas. I’m fascinated by surgery, freaks of nature, entomology, botanicals and obsolete machinery. Birds play an important recurring theme acting as spiritual messengers, either for good or ill. Another repeated theme is to incorporate flesh with machinery to create a Rube Goldberg of the human psyche.
Philosophy of Mind: Many of my works are psychological in nature. I’m interested in exploring the dichotomy between mind and body, the effects of cognitive power on the physique. I want to show how a person is functioning underneath the surface. I like to expose the body and let the viewer see inside.
Foam core: all my early collages are flat. I didn’t start to add height until later. Now I often use archival foam core to lift elements of my work off the page. I find that the three dimensional effect lends additional drama to these mis en scene pieces and helps to highlight the meticulous nature of my cuttings.
Paper: Due to the high quality of color plates and lithography found in books, I prefer to use mainly original materials. The old books and photographs are compelling, as they each possess their own unique history, having passed through many hands before coming into my possession. The aged paper offers a beautiful natural patina and muted palette that serves as a perfect canvas for my intricately cutout assemblages.
Cutouts: I have hundreds of complicated cut out pieces at my disposal. Over the years I have built up an extensive library of images that I have cut out, sorted and stored in a variety of boxes and archival drawers. Periodically I just spend my time cutting. I can spend weeks or months doing nothing but cutting out images. I then go to my studio and create because so much work has already been done.
Tables: I usually work on anywhere between twenty to forty pieces at a time. I have tables set up through out my studio. It’s an ongoing process and my tables are continuously full of work in all stages. Each piece is like trying to solve a puzzle. Some of them I figure out right away others take a bit longer. It can take weeks, months or even years to finish a piece.
Why collage?: I have always been doing collage in one way or another in my work over the years, tearing up drawings, creating small Xerox collages to be projected were techniques I used regularly in school. I have whole scrapbooks of these collages. The real milestone occurred when I began using the images directly from the books then my collages took off in its present direction.