Art I'm Making: More Collages

I'm continuing to have fun making collages. I've finished ten small pieces now in as many weeks--not that quantity is important. When I finish a piece, I like to mat it and hang it on the wall a while. I like to look at it to see if it's really finished. Often some little detail will begin to bother me or some corner of the work will start asking me for a little more attention. After a while, I'll decide that a spot of color here or a line there will truly complete the piece. And then I can move on.

Once in a while, something that seems finished begins to look all wrong. Inevitably, I take it down and destroy it or I paint over it. The nice thing about collage is that destruction can be generative of new things. One of the first collages I made, the largest of them, began to look wrong after a few weeks. Usually I have an inkling that something is wrong from the beginning when something is wrong, but sometimes I'm initially quite happy with what I've done. I took this particular collage down and cut it to pieces, and from the pieces made three new, smaller collages that I like better--the three pictured here. The original collage is at the bottom of this post. Can you see where the new works came from?