Art I'm Making: One of my collages reproduced in Kolaj Magazine

I was pleased to see one of my collages reproduced in the current issue of Kolaj, an international quarterly dedicated to the art of collage (No. 18, page 34) in an article about "collage painting." While I don't normally think of my work as collage painting, the author of the article, Ric Kasini Kadour, argues that the term is useful in describing collage work that, when representational, subordinates the collaged fragments used to "the gestalt of the picture" to create a whole rather than juxtaposing relatively independent, distinctly different collage elements to set up tension between two or more picture segments, a technique common in Surrealist collage and among the Dadaists.

The author used my Untitled Collage No. 158 (Santa Rosa), as an example of a non-representational collage that emphasizes a compositional whole. Before concluding the article by saying "Wholeness, completeness is the magic of collage painting," he said I use paper elements like the sounds of violinists "in the pit orchestra of a grand opera," presumably to suggest that in my collages the whole composition is more important than any of the individual elements, and, as I work, I am always focused first on creating a stable yet dynamic compositional whole—so, I suppose he has a point. In any case, it was nice to see the work reproduced.