Friday, November 09, 2007

Purple Blend

Do you ever read the Sunday comics in full color? Did you realize you’re looking at pieces of the Sunday comics right now?

This collage is made up of pieces of the Sunday comics collected between September 2004 and March 2007. The only thing that they have in common are the colors. Speedball acrylic gloss is used to glue them down on Reeves BFK paper. I recently took a break from my dot artwork to complete this piece.


collage, 10.5" x 19"

So what made me create this work?

Well back in the summer of 1998 I took a trip to Chicago and saw the work of Ray Yoshida. He taught at the School of Art at the Institute of Chicago. I enjoyed the show so much I bought a catalog.

It wasn't until seven years later in March of 2005 that I got around to doing a piece in the spirit of the work I saw in Chicago. Cutting out the pieces from the Sunday funnies was very time consuming. This is how the piece looked as of that May - the two thirds mark.



Then in September of 2005 I was up in Memphis antsy about whether I had a house to go back to in Metairie. One fraternity brother living in Florida e-mailed me to see if I was all right. When I replied, I asked him who was living in Memphis that I could look up. As it turned out I found four of my fraternity brothers who were living in Memphis.

One of them, who had grown up in Memphis, is a landscape architect. He invited me to meet him on the site of an ongoing project. He and his crew were working on a basketball court with a connecting walkway to a main house. The owners of the main house bought the adjacent lot that used to have a house on it. The house had fallen apart.

When I arrived, the cement for the walkway had just been poured. A female member of the crew, with an artistic background, was sprinkling magenta and light blue pigment on the cement. She then placed a mold of sorts on top of the wet cement and stood on it. It left an imprint that gave the cement a slate-like texture. She repeated both steps for the length of the walkway. The pigments combined to make purple.

So that’s the story of this piece.