The materials to hand have always been books and magazines of some sort, more often than not, older than me. Ephemera and paper of all stripes are constant passions, and have been since my grandfather, who worked as a blacksmith and mechanic for the Nekoosa Mills in Wisconsin, gifted me a large box of typing paper in 1970.
My father died two months before I was born, so enchantment with all things prior to his death and my posthumous birth has been a constant in my creative life. That box and all gifts from my paternal grandfather will always remain talismanic. From whatever I've found my search is one aimed at re-creating that father I never had, thus most of the art I've made has to do with building a body from snippets and fragments. I published my first poems in 1982, but began drawing fervently that summer day when the seemingly endless paper supply arrived on Barney Street in Waukesha. I used the final sacred leaves nearly 20 years later, for my final papers in college.
I also collected fervently: baseball cards, stamps, comic books, books, magazines, and eventually art. When I moved to Brooklyn in 1992 I began in earnest turning much of what I'd seen into a running dialog that had been mostly reserved for words. Notebooks became sketchbooks.
Part taxonomy and all impulse, my actual practice in making a collage is preoccupied with the search and subsequent reconfiguration. I favor imagery from magazine illustration, mostly American, with a strong adherence to what I see as our delightfully ignorant innocence. Decidedly graphic, the only meaning inherent during the process is a general love for the color, stylization and form of advertising past- anachronistic jollification. The accompanying advertising language itself has informed my writing, and I feel lucky that both disciplines warp and weave together.
