“Scissors & Paste Man”

In my mid-40s, with no forethought or ambition, I began making collages. Just started cutting from books and laying down images on wooden boards. I laughed at how easy it came. Another person seemed to be handling the scissors and piecing the pictures together.

James Joyce called himself “a scissors and paste man.” Meaning, I suppose, he didn’t create the text of his books. He harvested it from the world. For a long time, I wanted to be an artist like Joyce. But narrative wasn't my forte.

For me, writing was not for developing plot, but for exploring perception, which is forever mediated by ideas. These “frequency bursts” were moments of meaning, when distant signs resonate with one another.

I studied Ulysses in grad school. I loved reading slowly and seeing how motifs connected across the text. Ulysses set the pattern for my collages, as a network of connected figures. There’s a Modernist touch about the collages, in the way they were made with an eye to the integrity of consciousness. Even with its pastiche and intertextuality, there’s a mythic quest underlying the half-finished scenes floating through these pieces. 

These half-finished scenes make the collages complete. Cutting and placing images was automatic—but not arbitrary. Motifs emerge and the mishmash gives way to cohesion. Relationships run through the scenes. The eye can link disparate bodies and technologies in correspondence and counterpoint. The sliced-up artifacts alter their original import and point in new directions. Looking at the collages feels like another prose poem of mine, a story of a man in a maze trying to solve his way out:

The maze is made of touchstones. It becomes a sort of hallucination. According to Criticism, the artifacts (of his personality) are hollow. But there’s a force that persuades him. Each sensation is overtaken by association, if not passion. His life takes him in two directions.

I hope my artwork takes you between two worlds: the one of obvious appearances and the elusive one beneath that, a maze of flux and association that fills perception with mystery.