I love Chagall’s work. And looking at it I realized how many pieces of mine were unconsciously influenced by his style. Although he was a painter, he worked in almost every medium. And there is about his work the look of the collage. I have included one of my pieces.
Mara Kurtz runs her own design school. She also has a blog that you might find interesting. I like some of her collage work. There is a feel of the ‘Cleavers do cubism’ about them. Although they use some of the tools of the more political/critical collages about them, they are not critical of the American experience. In fact they almost seem neutral toward Amercan culture.
There used to be an expression when I was a kid. If you screwed up you were called ‘a block head’. I don’t know where the expression came from but it seems to have faded from the scene. Perhaps I created it. When my mother gave birth to me, the doctors observed that I had an unusually large head. It almost killed my mother. They did not do many caesarean births at the time so they had to cut into her bones. Once I was released into this dimension (I think I had a dimension of my own) the doctors were worried that my neck might not support my head, that my head might keel over and break my neck. By the age of four, I could wear my father’s hat. My head was not only large but very hard. A neighbourhood kid hit me over the head with a baseball bat when I was five years old. I hardly felt it. I was run over by a car. The car received minimal damage. Me. Nothing. I did have to quit the football team. There were no helmets in my size. When a new law was created making it manditory to wear helmets on motorcycles, I had to give up my bike. I have a small benign tumour in my brain. There is plenty of room for growth. I measured my head one time and discovered upon investigation that Oliver Cromwell had the largest head in written history. We were like two peas in a pod.
Jutta’s work is quite beautiful. Watch the lines in her work and how they echo throughout the piece. And some of her work has the quality of being looked at from any direction. You can turn the piece upside down and it still looks applicable. I do wish there was more work because there is in each piece a sense of repetition in style and ‘feeling’ from other pieces. There is also a ‘Daliesque’ look about each piece. Which if you like Dali is lovely. And I like Dali.
Two factions of children in separate schools find themselves at odds. One is humiliated but rises to take vengeance on the other. It was war. And the children loved it.
Ken Anbender’s work is wonderful. There is plenty of variety and his use of colour and form is fantastic. At first glance some of the collages seem like surreal paintings but on closer look you can see the cuts. This looks to me like mostly cut and paste. I always read the artist’s statement and come away a little bewildered. They sound so high minded. Mr. Anbender’s is no different. But his work is terrific stuff.
I like Robert Magginetti’s work. A lot of it reminds me of traditional collages that I cut my teeth on. I have added one of my own that I think is similar to one of Magginetti’s.
Tom Gallant’s work has the headline grabbing use of pornography as art to fetch many a viewer. (I was intrigued myself.) There is an interesting interview with him about this topic in Glass magazine. I think that by definition one could say that art and pornography cannot be the same thing. It raises controversy where no argument exists. And in Tom Gallant’s case his lovely work is more like lace than print. One could look at his pieces and not even notice anything provocative about them.
From Robert Mars’ statement:
“My paintings employ layers of color, subtly collaged printed matter from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and stark, black imagery. Remote, indistinct landscapes capture the once poetic, and now nearly lost highway strips of the American past. Formerly the promise of hope and prosperity; these icons are now a sign of desperation and ruin.”
There is in Mars work a sense of bleakness. Peeled paint. Abandoned gas stations. Restaurants abandoned. A landscape where the language has somehow been lost. Some of the collages almost look like road maps. Like aerial shots of the landscape. With the roads gone.
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