About the Work

I have always been interested in the remnants of the past found on vintage paper and how these pages document our ancestors’ attempts to affect their world. We think we have left behind many of the ideas recorded on these pages but they, along with old letters, scribbled notes, and music pages, remind us of how often we repeat their efforts with only a slight change in method.

It is these collaged sheets that create the background for my drawings. I may choose pages from one book, a group of related letters, or a jumble of different, unrelated pages. They form the background for my pastel drawings. The text, marks, and images on these pages inspire the stencil-like motifs I work in black, shades of gray or color. I often place several sheets of collaged paper together to create a larger surface on which to draw or create diptych or triptych images. These multi-sheet works are reflective the pieced together nature of our recollections of the past.

The viewer can see the text as simply a patterned background or read the individual pages to understand how I have related the motifs I have chosen for the specific image to its text. This relationship can be ironic, humorous, sad, or thoughtful.
I want to breathe new life into these sheets and respond to their texts, either accentuating their original intent, pointing out the irony of our assumptions that we are beyond what they represent, or even finding some point of absurdity in the words on those pages. Our past is still with us.

My collages also employ vintage paper, in for form of old periodical or book images. They are based in free association, creating discrete worlds merging image, color, and placement. They play with concepts and redefine reality. Their elements are combined intuitively sometimes with an idea of what I want to achieve and sometimes just letting the elements themselves drive the image, one thing leading to another.

There is always something of a surrealist element to collage, letting logic and reality go. These images were driven either by the text in a chosen element or by the configuration of that element. The results are pictorial “dreams”, bits of reality recombined to produce a new free form invented world.