The Rhythm of Scale
At a certain point in my studio practice, I realized that staying too long in any single scale began to dull my instincts. If I worked for weeks on large canvases, the intimacy of small works would start to slip away from me, and vice versa. Each scale requires a different rhythm of thinking, a different touch, a different orientation, a different kind of attention and strategy. The large scale demands bodily movement and orchestration, while the small scale is conversational, immediate, almost whisper-like. To stay fluent in both languages, I began deliberately switching back and forth as a matter of discipline.
When I’m on the road, I naturally work small - collages that fit in a satchel or backpack, assembled on hotel desks, coffee tables, or wherever I happen to be staying. These pieces are my portable studios, my field notes in paper and glue. They are efficient experiments: quick to make, easy to revise, and generous in what they reveal. A single day of collaging can generate a number of compositional ideas as a response to the found materials I am using. It is spontaneous and immediate. Months later, back in the studio, some of these might find their way into the vocabulary of a large painting.
The collage, by nature, is raw. It holds the immediacy of decision, the cut and thrust of thought before refinement sets in. When a collage proves itself - when it continues to speak after time has passed - I may translate it into paint. That process is slower, more deliberate. The energy of improvisation is transformed into a formal structure, its rough edges refined into a visual statement meant to endure. In a sense, painting is the long echo of the collage’s first clanging spark.
Because collage is fast and painting is slow, the balance between them tilts naturally toward an ever-growing archive of unrealized potential. There are stacks of collages waiting as proposals to become paintings, and I know I will never bridge that gap in my lifetime. Yet I find that to be a comfort rather than a frustration. It means the well is inexhaustible. Each time I start a new canvas, I am greeted by a field of possibilities - voices calling to be reinterpreted, expanded, or left as they are, perfect in their brevity.
In the end, this alternating rhythm between scales - between the small, the portable, and the monumental - keeps the work alive. It prevents complacency, renews my sense of play, and keeps the practice from calcifying into habit. To move between scales is to remember that art is not one continuous act, but an ongoing dialogue between immediacy and endurance, between the spark and its long, unfolding light.
In the same way I have included my writing practice also based primarily in a collage mindset. I compose collage poems, write stories, write journal entries, work on books, articles about creativity and philosophy. This activity is also in rotation with working on my paper table making collages and other works on paper or on the easel. I move fluidly between these three stations with the idea of working in many mediums at the same time.
The Archives as a Living Work
Over time I began to see that everything I was making - every painting, collage, photograph, note, and record - was part of a single, ongoing work of art: the Archives. It is not merely a collection of objects, but a living organism, a long performance unfolding over a lifetime. Every action I take in the studio, every page of documentation, every act of sorting or photographing or titling is part of the same choreography.
The Archives are my way of giving form to the totality of creative life. They include both the visible and invisible labor: the art itself, the writings about the art, the inventory lists, the stacks of source material, the ongoing process of arrangement and re-arrangement. The interaction with the larger artist community. All of it forms a labyrinthian body of work always in motion, perpetually in a state of creation and re-formation. In a sense, I am the archivist of my own unfolding myth, tracing how one gesture becomes another.
This approach was developed as a response to the every growing collection not only of my own work but also of the Ontological Museum when, after many projects and exhibitions, the accumulation of works in the collection had to be organized enough to remember everything and where everything is.
I think of this approach as a kind of modern polymathy. In an era where all bodies of knowledge are instantly accessible, no single discipline is sufficient to encompass the world as we live in it. To navigate this flood of information and possibility, one must work like a polymath - drawing from many domains, moving fluidly between art, philosophy, design, writing, and technology. The goal is not full mastery in each field, but integration: finding and binding the threads that connect everything into one coherent practice.
To avoid being lost in the abundance, I rely on motifs. They serve as constellations that orient the path of my work, recurring shapes of meaning and practice that tie together the fragments. Each motif - whether visual, conceptual, or linguistic - acts like a landmark within the larger terrain of the Archives. By returning to them, I maintain continuity even as the materials, scales, and contexts shift.
This way of working is less about control than about cultivating coherence amid endless expansion. The Archives evolve daily, expanding like a breathing organism, each piece informing the next. What might seem to others as disparate activities - painting, writing, photographing, cataloguing, collecting are simply different expressions of one gesture: the lifelong act of making sense through making art.
In the end, the Archives are not a record of what has been done, but a work of art that is still happening - an ever-renewing practice of attention, synthesis, and becoming.
This really stood out to me what you wrote: "The goal is not full mastery in each field, but integration: finding and binding the threads that connect everything into one coherent practice." When I got divorced and had to get a "real" job.....I more or less stopped creating my art for years as my job (bookstores) filled my time and any leftover I used to recover. But I never felt I stopped being an Artist. When an artist friend told me to create whatever I could even if it meant making little pieces or how I decorated my home. Long story short, when I was forced to retire a few yrs before I was going to, I suddenly had a ton of free time on my hands. Not having made the assemblage sculptures I used to make and sell in years, I started to make necklaces, then from there made these tiny assemblages, and they kept getting bigger until eventually I was back to making my usual size pieces and haven't stopped since. When I was working at the job, I still journaled and had all sorts of ideas about my art. When I finally started to make the pieces again, I had some self-doubt as to whether or not I still had "it". Not only have I discovered I never lost it (it just laid dormant), but my work is the best ever in ideas, application, craft, etc. Lately I've thought of making some small pieces again as I just loved the intimacy of those early pieces from when I started. Excellent article, Cecil. Always food for thought long after I've read your writings.
I love this reflection on shifting scales and mediums—your process feels alive and adaptable, not fixed. The idea of the Archives as a living, evolving work really resonates. It’s reassuring to hear that coherence can emerge from all the creative flux. Thanks for sharing these insights, they’re a real boost for anyone who works across different forms.