Holding Peace

A Series in Assemblage

“Permissions”

A Series in Collage

What Shakes the Eye

An Artist’s Book

Art

Painting is my foundation. For a decade and more, I worked in acrylic on canvas, later shifting to paper when I painted the illustrations for my children’s books. But all along I’ve also harbored a fascination for collage and assemblage. These days, I’ve been exploring them at last.

In both collage and its more three-dimensional cousin, assemblage, you bring fragments together—bits and pieces of this and that, materials and ideas you wouldn’t see together otherwise—to create a new whole. There’s a play and a randomness in it that often leads to surprise.

Yet the wholeness I’m looking for is not random. Nor is it easy to define, impossible really. Out of all conceivable combinations, why do certain images, colors, old papers, items of brass or wood, seem to resonate and “feel right” together? I don’t know why, I only know it happens. When it does, a wordless, visual language begins to stir. It feels like an “ahh” opening into awareness. It feels like a discovery. There’s a hidden poetry in one combination and not in another.

This “work” is a play of intuition and the senses. And that may be true for the viewer as well. I want my art to point beyond itself, to evoke an idea in us that may be hard to pin down, to hold a bit of the greater mystery in visible, tangible form. I rely on metaphor. And I hope each piece has a poetry and a presence of its own.