FIRST INK!

I sent my “Penny Colossus” post to the editors of KOLAJ Magazine, among others, and they were sufficiently intrigued to look at the rest of my website. That scrutiny resulted in the first print coverage of my visual art, in issue #43, now available. KOLAJ is a print-only quarterly, bless their analog hearts: no website to link to, only the ad-free magazine to purchase — become a subscriber! Meanwhile, I offer these blue-ish phone photos. All of these artworks appear elsewhere on the site — in their real colors.

The editors decided to write about my layered transparencies, work that I made between 2008 and 2012. I like to try new techniques and late one evening came across instructions for making transparencies that required only clear tape, tap water, and a spoon. I grabbed a roll of packing tape and made my way to the kitchen. For the next few years my Formica cabinets became a staging area. Dozens of transfers arrayed the surfaces and I’d stick them to one another, make more, trying to get something to happen. I transferred only black & white images without thought as to how they might combine. But combine they did. I made a lot of them and sold quite a few, including two to a London investment banker on the day the stock market crashed in 2008.

I remember that at breakfast time, my young son enjoyed seeing how they had moved arund while he slept. You know, the way toys do.

Ariel, up first, marries a 16th century Dutch engraving of the fickle goddess of Fortune (reverse) to a circus illustration. Long after her making, I gave her as a gift to my brother-in-law, whose unicorn of a daughter, Ariel, had become an actual aerialist. I’d be happy to sell you a lovely giclée print, though, not at all blue. She makes sturdy company.

The Caliper Sisters in Danger (below) came together from the accumulation of transparencies on the cabinet faces, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. It began with a newspaper photo of one-half an abandoned building, in the Bronx, I think. Catalog illustrations of calipers suddenly became bonneted ladies of another century leaving the house for a walk. I’m pretty sure they don’t see the US Marines on their lawn but whether the army is attacking or defending I still can’t say. A moody sky moves through and across the building; inexplicably, there’s a pony in an upper storey window. Across the cornice are two lines of text: “The Lady Poverty was fair: But she has lost her looks of late.”

I see that I placed a black rectangle to the right of the house. It may be a time portal. I can’t explain any of this. Who knows how long the various elements languished on the Formica before they recognized their collective purpose.? This is what I mean when I equate collage making with water-witching. The pictures know where they belong. I’m here to wield the crooked stick.

Long Ago was composed of newspaper photos of old New York, its streets and fire escapes blanketed with snow, when the city looks its best. I wanted to clarify the foreground and overlaid these children dressed for summer onto the snowy street. The menace of electrical wires comes from somewhere else. Chicago, maybe? I visited there a few years ago and was stunned at the unnerving thatch of overhead wires in some neighborhoods. The partial headline provided the title. I have to have titles.