Digital Collage Series

TAG MIX, the most recent group art exhibit by members of TAG, came down last week from the 801 Gallery in Tucson. (TAG stands for Tucson Artists Group, formerly the Thursday Artists Group, and originally named the Tuesday Artist’s Group.)  I made a series of seven 8×10 digital prints last December for the show, which opened on New Year’s Eve, 2009. I didn’t get my prints back, as the series was sold in the show. (They are cheap.) I’ll post them here in the order I hung them, left to right. They don’t tell a story, but they did fall into a sequence, at least to me, like stanzas in a song.

Just a note on the process: I work on these collages as a meditation. There is no deadline and no objective except to let my mind wander and to make productive use of all the odd things I have accumulated over the years. I scan things and put them together intuitively, trying to avoid any obvious logical story lines.

Many are from the old maps, prints and books collected by my former illustration teacher, Don Sayner. When he died four years ago, I helped his family sort through all his piles and sell what was valuable. Now I have piles of his stuff. I don’t want to hoard things like Don did, so I scan them before I let them go to the recycling bin or an antique auction. I store them now on a hard drive.

I call these small works visual poems. I have been working with exacto knife and glue like this since I was a teenager and now I use Photoshop.  I can’t call them a numbered print edition because every time I go back to an older one, I make some little changes, so I just date the prints.