Abstract Limited Edition Giclee Print of shops Original Collage 2019 Framed as shown

This is a limited edition (1/25) giclee print made from an original miniature collage titled "Inner Sanctum". The original was 2.5 x 3.5 inches and has been enlarged to 11 x 14 inches which includes a faux mat.
Outer dimensions as framed 13 x 16 inches.

Artist Statement:
Memories are formed of bits and pieces, fragments and snippets; piecemeal images overlaid with a multitude of emotions, tastes, smells, sounds and sensations. Often they appear to combine into random patterns and sequences, yet secretly possess an inscrutable logic we may never understand. Our shared humanity is built of personal, familial, and cultural memory linked closely to what we call history. Yet though we share a common family, society, or nation, our individual memories remain unique; a psychic fingerprint, if you will; a tapestry woven of our own deeply personal design.

Each collage begins in miniature format: just 2.5 x 3.5 inches.
Random pages from a series of 19th century chemistry journals served as a starting point. I was attracted to the expressive nature of the fonts, the unusual graphics, and the mystery of their origin.

The next phase was a multi-step process of overlaying photographic images on selected pages from those journals. The photographs came from many sources: my own previous collages, textural images, technical diagrams, and vintage book illustrations. The final layers consist of excerpts from various literary sources translated into non-Western languages. Taking the familiar and encoding it in a foreign language seems parallel to how our minds may take a benign image and somehow, over time, invest it with a mysterious significance.

I piece together each abstracted “memory” using cuttings from the layered newsprint images, and adding in the occasional bit of fabric, assorted papers, ribbon, fibers, splotches of paint--anything that might enhance the image taking shape. The colored newsprint is my paint and the overlaid text and drawings provide the linear elements for each composition. The final step is to convert each miniature collage into an 11 x 14 inch giclee print. Enlarging the image calls forth textures and details not readily apparent in the original miniature format; in the same way that a therapist or counselor may guide us to unravel the details of our compressed (or repressed) memories. The giclee print also serves to freeze the image in time and provides greater color stability and permanence to the finished work of art.

Divining the source of an abstract work of art can be like searching for the origin of a single shard of sea glass. There it is sparkling in your hand, but its birth may have been in a dimly lit, 19th century New England glass factory; the toil of a gifted artisan who all the while worried if his work would shops be enough to provide for his growing family. And so it is with this current series of collages. I painstakingly guided the formation of each piece, had a sense of a story it was attempting to tell, but was rarely aware of the point of conception.