From a Shoreless Sea (2)

Response to a comment

Kathryn Vercillo (who writes the newsletter Create Me Free) asked a question about a previous post. Her whole comment was:

Love learning about your process in this way. Very intriguing. When you made the first few collages using that Black and White original piece, did you set out to continue using it for years or did it just kind of happen that way?

Once I started to respond to the comment I realized there was enough of an answer to actually make a follow up article. So here it is.

Response to a Comment under From a Shoreless Sea: Poems in the Present Tense

 Actually, I have written someplace that the first of those black and white collages were from protest posters I found on the street in Paris back in May of 2002. The poster was an anti-violence poster probably in reference to Bush’s Iraq War. The small poster, about 12 x 12 inches simply said STOP THE VIOLENCE. It was May Day which is the usual day in Paris for protesting because it is Labor Day in France.

Interestingly, May Day in France started in 1890 as a response to the May Day labor demonstrations and protests by the American workers' unions in 1884 and 1886 who were demanding higher wages and an 8-hour workday.

I was in Paris for about 10 days staying in an apartment near Place de la République so that was where I went to check out the marches and protesting. I took some photos that I have on my computer somewhere but can’t find them at the moment. In the late afternoon it started to lightly rain and most people started going home and I wandered around picking up some collage material from the streets before the city clean-up crews came out and cleaned up everything to the point that you could not tell there had even been a protest. I thought that was amazing, but I guess the city has had more than a century to practice cleaning up after the May Day protests.

Fusion Series no.1850 - 2002 - I am pretty sure this was one of the original collages from Paris

When I got back home, I made these posters into collages and sent them to my dealer in New York who immediately sold them and wanted more. But that was all that kind of paper I had. At that time I was working only with found materials Kurt Schwitters fashion.

Eventually however,  I decided that since it was a printed poster, I could just print my own poster with the font and letters exactly how I wanted them, so I designed it and had an edition of 500 printed and have been using that source paper ever since. I probably still have at least half of them.

the original design for the Massurrealist Festival poster

The poster I designed was for a proposed Massurrealist festival in Berlin in 2005 that we ended up not doing. But I used the idea of the festival to make the poster I needed for collage material.

my current box full of collage material from the poster

I figured out how to distress the paper to simulate the original Paris poster that I found in the street after a rain and after being dirty and messed up from people walking on it during the May Day protests that year.

I usually make folding creases then sandpaper the surface of the poster, then stain the paper with instant coffee or a tinted glaze, then I cut the posters up into roughly rectangular pieces and keep them in a plastic box that is ready for collaging anytime I decide to sit down and make more of these collages.

Another thing I did was using this type of collage as ‘plates’ to make a book called The All New and Improved Neoist Manifesto (a trans-lingual edition) in 2008.

And of course, like I mentioned in the original article, I use these collages as studies to later make many of my paintings from.