Journey With Collage
There was a hot minute in the 2010’s where I was ingesting beyond the recommended dose of psychedelics. As I oscillated between brilliant epiphanies and bizarre conclusions no one could follow (lets just name it psychosis), I came across the world of graffiti.
put art on public wall and everyone will love me, got it
Not quite.
I was caught up by the immediacy of this art form. Not so much the tags, but more the characters and poems, and the political edge of it all. No one was asking permission to do graffiti. The illegality of it only heightened the awareness of the act, not the compulsion of it. Unlike traditional or social media, the message didn’t have to skirt around algorithms or industry gate keepers.
I’m not much of a painter - didn’t want to stain my precious Sally Ann finds - but I had a roommate who got me into the art of collage. Unlike art classes in high school, we weren’t randomly throwing magazine scraps together then tripping out on its subconscious conversations. Rather, we were carefully and tenderly slipping images out of National Geographics and tucking them inside abandoned issues of the Economist, GQ, and Anal Mayhem - crafting conversations between crass and degrading consumerism with the resilience of the human spirit. THEN we’d trip out over what each other made.
then what, gramma nainers??
Well my chick-a-dees, gramma would make herself a whole pot of wheat-paste then spread those conversations around town.
1 part bleached flour
4 parts water
3 tablespoons of processed sugar
and then you became famous and kissed banksy on the mouth??
No, something even better happened. No one recognized my art, and the people I told about it didn’t really care. Actually, the people I told reminded me that half the fun of graffiti is to be anonymous (for me that’s impossible). But, the commercial failure of drunkenly pasting edgy collage art around the city brought me into a better place.
I remember sitting down one day and having a think.
When am I an artist?
When I gain the respect of my peers?
The respect of the organizations?
The publishing houses?
The award committees?
The academy?
Of God?
Of the cosmos?
The further I dug into that question, I realized that what really made myself an artist wasn’t so much the validation from others, but the self-knowledge that I spoke from an authentic place in a creative way. I wasn’t chasing after trends or the hottest take. In those midnight strolls, slathering lamp posts, I spoke into a void where my message was fleeting due to weather, sanitation engineers, angry parents, and other artists. What do you say when your words will be lost?
It’s a question older than Ozymandias, yet I can get so caught up in the whole “look upon my works ye mighty and despair.” Day after day, watching my carefully crafted collages get scraped off, washed out, torn apart, or pasted over… you can only flex so much before a dreaded sense of nihilism looms over head.
My work had a biting cynicism with a dark sense of humour, until I posted one on an abandoned telephone booth: a wood elf thinking inside the word “journey” like it was a little boat. The next day, all the graffiti on that booth was scraped off, except the wood elf in his boat. You best believe I felt quite proud of that. Then, the next day, he was gone, too.
An analytical mind would say I got amazing feedback on which work has broader appeal. But, I see it more as the void of the general public absent mindedly bumbling throughout the day, took notice and spoke back because I had something to say.
I take that lesson with me whenever I sit down to create.
I’ve written and published two books now. They’re both crazy guys ho-ho, but I wrote them in the same spirit. My upcoming poetry collection, Smokin’ Holy Spirits, may be wild and careening, diving into heavy subjects such as religious trauma. But, as weird as those poems are, I wrote them in the same spirit as when I crafted that little wood elf in his journey boat. Speaking with love and intention, as I did with the collages I share here.
So what’s all these pictures then?
After a couple years of doing that, a friend convinced me to scan at least some of my collages. I may have taken the whole impermanence aspect of wheat-pasting too religiously, so I actually only have these select photos as documentation of my graffiti life.
Legend says I collaged a 18”x24” piece with a lady riding a golden lab that shot lasers out of its eyes, and left that collage in a bag with a card by a dumpster at Falconetti’s Bar & Grill.
But that’s for another time.
