why collage is my thing

By wielding paper rather than paintbrush, I invite chance and serendipity to play a central, guiding role in my work. Using pieces of advertising posters, packaging, and other printed paper odds & ends from the street and the recycle bin for color, imagery, texture, scale—everything—I cede a significant amount of control to something beyond and outside myself and the studio. It's a kind of collaboration that, though I work alone, feels remarkably like what I experience playing jazz with fellow musicians. Night after night they bring things unexpected and fresh to savor and respond to on the bandstand.

If my work holds any value to the viewer, I would guess it's in the extent to which it embodies or communicates that spirit of playful collaboration and exploration, of openness to happenstance, for which I credit the medium of collage, my daily contact with a sense of possibility and wonder.

Part of a cache of recently salvaged posters. Stuck together with wheat paste, they are often many layers thick. Like an archeologist I carefully moisten and separate the layers, looking for buried treasure in the midden. The red poster here, with the fun text "Meglio Stasera!" ("Better this Evening!") was hidden under a poster for last season's Nutcracker, which has some areas of an attractive blue I'm sure I'll find use for.