making a mess (part 3)
where we are now in the present, more or less
My collage journey, as I’m describing it for the purposes of this newsletter, has been one of fits and re-starts. As I’ve written for the last two episodes of Random Orbit, collage has served as basically art therapy for me. Each time I’ve gone down that rabbit-hole full of paper scraps and glue, it’s been as a reaction to the more business side of my illustration life. I make a living hitting deadlines and giving my clients work that is expected, mostly repeatable, and somewhat predictable.1 The best way to do this in the 21st century is with a computer and Photoshop. But as I also make my living by channeling my childhood hopes, fears, and dreams into writing and drawing stories, I also, occasionally in the past, more often now, find the need to satisfy that child-like sense of play and mess and unpredictability. Collage has been that antidote. In this issue of my manifesto, I’ll bring you up to date on what I’ve been doing lately.
As I made the trucks, back in 2019, I thought a lot about how I might use collage in my children’s book illustration. I wrote previously about my belief that collage would actually be difficult to use, because of the nature of the material. If I use some old ephemera to create part of a scene or character, I’d need to be able to repeat that ephemera in order to repeat that scene or character. Scanning that old newspaper ad, or having enough of the thing on hand that I can repeat it page-by-page of a book would largely defeat my entire purpose. There is another reason I think it might not work well for books, which is that a reader, especially a curious kid-reader, can get distracted by the pieces. Miss the forest for the trees, as it were. Especially when the collage materials include discernible type and image — this works and is fun to pick out in an individual image, but if Red-Riding-Hood’s cape is made of a Campbell Soup can advertisement, it would likely be distracting.
In June 2022, months before the skull and the guitars, and with this in mind, I decided to attempt a character of some kind. I took a drawing I’d made of a grasshopper and re-created it with collage.
This was a great leap2 forward for me. I felt it proved I could handle the problem of distraction. Other illustrators have handled this well too, Wolf Erlbruch being my favorite here, though granted, Erlbruch mostly used his own hand-drawn pieces and often they were used as clothing patterns and shapes.3 But this grasshopper also proved the inevitability of the other issue I have, which is that there is not a world where I’d want to recreate this grasshopper doing different things - hopping, holding a cup of tea — in different angles and perspectives, over 32 pages of a picture book. Would I make a book of different insects and animals? Yes, that would be awesome. Just like different trucks. But creating this guy over and over again for a story in a book would kill me. Thanks, I’ll stick to drawing.
But I love this grasshopper.4
The next big step for me, as collage goes, was this much simpler piece I made for my wife on her birthday. We love tinned sardines and mackerel, and again with the idea of repetition in mind, I made a little tinned fish. The idea here was to have the three fish look alike, but each unique.
These fish were made in January 2023, and it was right around then that these collages got some attention, and I was offered an interview and feature in Contemporary Collage Magazine, which is a beautiful mostly-online5 publication. CC Magazine has introduced me to some of my now-favorite artists: Cecil Touchon, Jerry Jeanmard, or Julie Liger-Belair, Steven Heaton. I was over the moon to be included.
Through 2022 and into 2023 I was keeping at it, keeping a regular practice of collage in between books and teaching and other work. I played with faces, making two collages where I attempted to describe a person, to some extent, for the first time. Like much of my previous work, these both came from sketches. When I sketch with collage in mind, I’m thinking about shapes and layers. These sketches give me a framework, and it’s fun to try to solve the puzzle and see where it leads, as well as where it strays.
As has become my pattern, I took a break at this point. With the exception of a commissioned version of the three fish, these were the last two collages I made for more than a year. I didn’t stop thinking about collage this time, however, especially with that feature in CC behind me.6 Instead, I planned. I was asked to have a show at a local coffeeshop gallery in January 2025, where I would need 18-25 new works. I knew I wanted this to be collage work. At the time, I had the idea to make it all science fiction-based. Robots, spaceships, astronauts. I have dozens of sketches of this sort of thing that would work as collages.
But, up until I returned from my five-week stay in France, I hadn’t cut a single piece of paper since January 2023.
With the Chapterhouse deadline in my head, and the inertia of a French vacation in my heart, it wasn’t two days after returning to Philadelphia that I was in the studio, cutting paper and gluing it to stuff. I started with insects.
I moved to a bird with a hat. I made a robot without a hat. I thought of a new theme for the Chapterhouse show (things with and without hats: call the show “Avec Chapeau.” Plays off the recent French inspiration as well as a joke from my first picture book I wrote, Everything Goes on Land, back in 2011.) I have work to do, but getting back into the habit made it all feel much more possible.
I think this brings me up-to-date, to the point where I was neck deep two weeks ago, and began writing these posts. Wrapping up these three newsletters about collage sort of dovetails with the fact that I need to get back on the sketches for a book that is due soon and write the insect stories. I mentioned to Sacha the other day, while I was working on the robot with the teal stripe up there, that while trying to figure out what goes on the teal stripe and above the robot-brain, I suddenly lost interest in searching my pile of magazines and ephemera, and cutting, and gluing. I washed off the brushes, put away the scissors, and I went home. Whatever need I had for the last month had been fulfilled. I set collage aside for a few days; I’m working from home this week (the studio often represents a lot of things I am NOT doing, and being here with just the ipad focuses me on what I NEED to do. At least this week it does.) and I’ll get back to it next week. Not next year. NEXT WEEK. I PROMISE.
(There will be one more collage newsletter, also next week. This one will be about process and materials. Same time same place!)
Can work, actual work, be a distraction? Let’s say yes.
About two weeks ago, in an email, a good friend of mine mentioned that he’s been giving himself the homework each morning of writing five-hundred words before checking email. This struck me as a good idea, and last Monday I sat down outside on our front porch at 6:00am with my laptop, opened a file that had been giving me fits, typed “chapter one",” and I began writing. The writing I did that Monday, all 750 or so words of it, isn’t very good, and it wasn’t supposed to be. It was supposed to lead to Tuesday. It succeeded.
Tuesday I wrote another 500-something. Wednesday was a bust, so I just researched the thing I was writing (I read the internet, basically, but productively). Thursday and Friday, 500+ each day. I took the weekend off and sat down Monday and got 270 words in. Fail? No. It was difficult going, and I stopped at a place that I knew would be good for Tuesday morning.
And Tuesday, yesterday, was a revelation. I wrote the fourth of five chapters in this little story about a beetle musician, and in that chapter, most of the things I did not know about my beetle and my story were revealed. Even better, I learned the ending of the story, the end of chapter five which I hadn’t even started yet. But I knew how this goes, I knew what I had. And I love it when the universe tells you “this is good, and please continue.”
This 500-words thing needs its own newsletter post. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, here are two beetle musicians.
Thanks for reading.
I understand that some readers might howl at this. Art is supposed to be none of those things! Okay, that’s fine. You’re wrong, but somewhere deep inside I also agree. Which is the whole point of these collages.
Pun intended, duh.
Not to mention, Erlbruch was a genius.
I’ve since built a frame for it, and it was chosen for last year’s 3x3 Illustration Annual, as well.
35 issues published as PDFs, and, so far, two as actual printed magazines.
I stayed busy: I illustrated three picture books in 2023, two more in 2024 so far, and I gave myself the job of finding new markets for my other illustrations, a project that is ongoing fifteen months later, and a subject for another newsletter.
I signed up...great collages...smile...
great stuff!.. fun for my eyeballs and my melon… thanks for sharing not just the visuals, but the stories around those pieces too.