Principles, Procedures, and the Language of Collage
A statement from the artist

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OVER twenty years, the process of collage-making has suggested a life metaphor; one in which we piece together the fragments of our lives and ride the universal wave of human experience.

As a physicist attempts to explain the nature of life by reconfiguring sets of equations, hopefully leading to some unified theory, my visual work seeks a coherence, an elegant means for organizing complex visual data on a two-dimensional plane according to some inner question, some leap of imagination.

Following a period of mastery-of-technique, my iconography began to emerge as a signature style by 1984. The period during which an artist masters individual technique conforms to a scientist learning advanced mathematics and theory as tools of speculation, investigation, and experimentation. Artists are concerned with the poetic treatment of that same conceptual space, only in tactile or plastic form. Using abstraction as an approach to form - human and anthropomorphic creatures, lush images of vegetation- and a color palette from highly saturated color to a black-gold/silver palette, I amassed a set of repeated forms which rush through the picture plane. My work seeks a symmetry and a depth of field through a "layering" of forms across a space-time continuum creating a "visual language". Working with an assortment of papers-mostly handmade or imported- and testing and mixing several adhesives, the task was then to devise a logistical means for sequencing and arranging each layer of each dimension on the picture plane to create an illusion of hyperspace or depth of field. Three means resulted; one, the use of clear sheets of acetate to lay out and separate each layer, the second, using a Spectra Polaroid instamatic to take instant photos of each layer. The third, and more recent, has resulted from the use of computer scans of existing works from color slide format to jpeg file format. Filtering tools allow the reconfiguration of a work in such a way that the same composition can be visualized through many different treatments. This latter technology has triggered infinite possibilities for my own work. Further, computer graphic and sound applications as well as the internet have opened up opportunities in a wide range of fields from theatre set design to creating published research for electronic journals.

The topics of my work in collage and poetry line up with on-going commitments to global projects, the use of the arts and cultural exchange to advance the peace process by getting people, particularly urban students, to think differently about puzzle-solving the great issues of our time.

Depicting cross-cultural myths and tales, family portraiture, and social themes such as the establishment of world peace (the nine-part Peace Series, 1989-90), I have attempted to invoke a mood which, I hope, inspires the viewers with an elegance of form and a more universal coverage of the varying meanings of humanism. As such, social issues often find their most discomforting but necessary presence in my work. Two, more recent installation works are "Morningsong for a Tillian King" (1993), a commentary and poem on the Rodney King incident and "Freedom and Madness" (1994) concerning the tensions of living the truly democratic life. Exhibited at the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston (1993) and the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts (1995). Public response to "Morningsong.." was particularly compelling given the brutality of the installation piece as a manifestation of violence and brutality. This work represented a marked departure from the style and medium of my ‘signature’ work. However, many artists would agree that the process of art-making is an eternal struggle with experimentation. As an individual passes through different stages in their life, the expression of artistic messages and their execution must undergo transformation, lest the artist die with their genre. Art is a means, then, for perpetuating personal expression and defying mediocrity and it keeps us thinking about who we are as human beings. It is a life commitment for me and a "calling", urges which began with my father’s tutelage.

The socialization and informal training of an artist has many elements which are linked with personal satisfaction and occupational success. Mentoring is an integral, though sometimes absent, aspect of an artists’ career mobility. For some of the most formative years of my creative productivity I was fortunate to have Jones as a mentor. She aggravated, assaulted, role-modeled, encouraged, advocated, titillated, chastised, questioned, and praised my career and creative output with the goal of making me a better artist. I only hope she is proud that another generation has accepted the mantle of leadership in a profession which has always been a long and thorny, but spiritually redemptive, road.