Painting

Although I am, if I do say so myself, an experienced and even award-winning visual artist, I have never thought of myself as a painter. I did paint with acrylics in my youth, as well as do drawings with technical pens. I always preferred acrylics to oils because they are less toxic, and I also their overlap in technique with watercolors. I enjoyed painting, but it was purely an amateur hobby pursuit.

Last year I rediscovered a cache of some of those old paintings, and was interested to notice that some of the same themes I still pursue in my visual art were already fully-formed: transformation, shamanic and archetypal themes, cosmic imagery, mountains and moons. It is always interesting to learn that some of the themes that you thought you'd grown into along the way were in fact there from the very beginning.

I still don't think of myself as a painter, and probably never will.

Nonetheless most of the art I've made over the past month or so has been: painting.


Kandinsky's Poem, 2012
Collage, papier-maché, altered books, acryclic painting, brush calligraphy, photography, on watercolor paper, 30"x40"

This is a piece I made to donate to a fundraiser being done by the local public library to support literacy education in the community. Literacy was something both of my late parents felt strongly about—our family when I was growing up was a family of avid readers who were not averse to pulling out the dictionary or encyclopedia even while at the dinner table to answer a question—and both of them volunteered to teach literacy at the local public library. So, for me, when I was given the chance to donate art for a literacy fundraiser, it was a chance to connect to my parents, and also to a cause I myself support.

I made this piece to be donated. But as I worked out what I wanted to do, I realized I wanted to start with an acrylic underpainting. Bright colors, that would show through the papier-maché layer, which consisted of prints of my own photos and pages from an old two-volume dictionary. I highlighted the key words on the pages torn from the dictionary using Japanese brush calligraphy materials.

The altered books aspect of this collaged piece was in fact the central aspect, and the origin of the project. The call for donations from local artists, for the library fundraiser, was specifically about altered books. This is a form of art-making using recycled materials that I've been interested in for a few years, but never worked in before. An altered book is essentially an artwork made from an existing bound book, or its pages, or form, or materials. The creative possibilities are endless. I remember seeing examples of books a few years ago from the Berkeley Public Library, books that had been vandalized or damaged, and were given to local artists to make into altered books. In other words, to be given new life. That was spirit of this local library literacy fundraiser, and books were provided by the library, but you could also use your own. I used this old two-volume dictionary that I found at the local thrift store for almost no money at all. And no doubt will make more art from these volumes, as well as some others I have set aside to work with.



After finishing this large collaged piece, I continued to feel an urge to paint with acrylics. So I went and got a few more large sheets of fine printmaking paper, and have been painting. I am almost done with one more large painting, which is purely a painting. I've been working with large swatches of paint, teaching myself both saturated color and dry-brush techniques. I've been reading books about acrylic painting in the public library, and making notes. I've been thinking about putting more art on the wall over my bed in my bedroom; and what better thing to put up there than something I made. I don't care if anyone thinks it's narcissistic, but most of the time I'd rather make art to put up than buy it. I don't call myself a painter, but I am an artist.



As I've been working on this large painting, I've been making photographs of it as I proceed. Both to document the process, so I can retain what I've learned by doing, but also because I had the idea to make detail photographs (detail, meaning close-ups of sections of the artwork) for the purposes of stock photography. Such abstracted forms could be used in future for stock backgrounds, as elements of illustrations, and more. I have worked on this large painting over two or three sessions so far, and have one or two more sessions to go before I reach the point that I have envisioned in my mind.

One reason I referenced painter Wassily Kandinsky in the collages piece I donated to the fundraiser was that Kandinsky, as well as being one of the founders of Modernist abstract painting, wrote extensively about his theories of emotion in painting, about how he wished to reduce representation in painting to pure emotive form, to tell a story in an abstract way. I've written here before about abstract realism in photography; now I approach the topic from the direction of painting, as influenced by Kandinsky.

What I am intending to do with this artwork I am making, despite refusing to label myself as a painter, is brushwork that evokes emotion.

Brushwork can refer to calligraphy as well as painting, writing as well as representational art. Indeed, in Chinese and Japanese art history, brushwork refers to all of the above; because writing in those cultures is ideogrammatic rather than alphabetic, and done with a brush and ink, there are even literary forms that reference the brush in their definitions. So, for me, brushwork includes more than painting.

I am interested in Kandinsky's ideas about how abstraction can still evoke emotion. Almost in the same way music does, not through specific image but through form and mood and color and rhythm. Abstraction that evokes feeling. Which of course is what the American abstract expressionists were pursuing in the middle of the 20th Century. But they were painters, and I'm not.



So, since I work in multiple media, it's only natural that I would import my paintings into the digital realm and work with them there as well. I've been experimenting combining text and illustration, for example.


Storm Coming Near, 2012

I go back and forth between digital and actual painting in this work, which to me seems entirely natural. Paintings will become elements of digital illustrations, be used in stock photos, and will influence art made directly in the digital realm.

One of the most interesting parts of this ongoing exploration has involved painting on photographs, both actual and digital.



What I am exploring now is painting digitally on my tablet computer, my iPad. I am using several apps to paint digitally on the tablet, both in terms of making original illustrations and calligraphic pieces, and also in terms of painting on photographs.


Taos Home

I am particularly enjoying making paintings from some of my best photographs of the Southwestern United States, photos made on recent roadtrips. This is a process of using the photograph as a reference for making an original painting.


Vermillion Cliffs, NM, 2012

Sometimes I start by painting-over a photograph using digital painting software. I can sample and replace the colors in the original image, or I can go wild. I can make the forms and elements of the piece realistic in one area, and completely abstract in another. I find myself usually preferring to veer towards abstract realism.

I have no real desire to learn how to paint or draw photo-realistically, but that is what most instructional books emphasize. If I want a photo-realistic image, I make a photograph, because I am a professional photographer. I have those tools and those skills. I am much more interested, in drawing and painting, in loose realism, or abstract realism.

As with photography, I often begin with a landscape, a place and a time, a mood, an evocative moment. In making a photo, I often wait a long time for the light to be perfect, before I release the camera shutter. Photography can be an art that teaches you extreme patience. You learn to look at your subject a very long time, to see it, before you make your image. These are often the kinds of images I choose to make into painted versions.


Moonrise, 2012

Shapes and forms. Elements of color. Mood and feeling. Abstract realism. Emotion and music and lighting and those times when art takes you out of your mind and into your larger self.

That's what I am seeking as someone who has been painting lately. I am not a painter, and don't want to get stuck in that definition, which limits and skews as often as it liberates. I'm aware of art history, but I'm not dwelling on it. I'm just making some paintings.

This trend is continuing and growing. I am also making little illustrated visual haiku, calligraphic illustrations, sketches and drawings and little scraps of ideas. I'll write more about that later.

Route 66 Collage

Snapshots from the road, driving the first couple of days of roadtrip/vacation. These scenes mostly from Illinois and Missouri.

I've driven all of old Route 66 now at least twice, sections of it considerably more than that. It's still a fascinating bit of Americana, both kitsch and brilliant. "Get your kicks on Route 66" still rings true, if not always for the original reasons given in the song. It's still "America's Highway," and will be for a long time, in popular myth and folklore, if not in actual fact.

The ride's only begun. No doubt more collages will follow. After all, I have new tools for making art, on this new roadtrip. So I'm trying new things as I go.

Night Colors

(Click on image for larger versoin)

Is it the breeze that moves the flag,
or the flag that moves the breeze?
It is the mind that moves both.

New Photoshop Collages

Or are they montages. Or assemblages. The definitions are a bit vague, and there's a lot of overlap. Actually, not to worry. I just play around and make the things. Let someone else do the due diligence about clarifying the art-historical definitions. At the moment I can't be bothered.

Some recent work, then. Some new pieces. Some experiments in Photoshop in combining elements into a new work. Some experiments in photography and and typography, and overlap between. Some type effects made in Photoshop, still an underutilized design tool. The design tools are only as good as the designer's conceptions, after all; it's the user that drives.

All of these made from photos taken within the past month, on a few evenings when I wanted to make something, but was too tired to do much more than sit in the comfy chair with the laptop. The process of creativity often begins with looking at what you have, then starting to play around with it. Ideas and concepts might emerge from the play, leading you towards a particular artistic outcome, but the process of play is at least as important as the product, to the artist. I play around like this a lot, but not all the products get finished, or are exceptionally interesting, or even good art. You have to be willing to fail.

(Click on images for larger versions.)


Spring Flowers 2011

Including a haiku spawned by the artwork, written in response to the flower essences, and included in the work:

spring awakening
at the well of pollen
divine light of bees


Bushmills Warhol

Could also be titled "The monkey approaches the blowtorch." A spontaneous bit of photography Alex and I did with our cameras at a St. Paul pub near his apartment on my last visit there, before he moved down to New Mexico. We had been running errands all day, and stopped in for a meal, and also a drink with the meal. We got into playing with the close up and macro features of our cameras, using props on the table, and, well, our monkey selves.

So this is sort of a self-portrait, Warholized, but not really, since Alex took the shot. Or did he? I can't remember.


Roads 2011, no. 1

Photos taken while driving. Here displayed side by side, in order, as a triptych. The hour was blue, twilight after sunset, driving home from far away. I love how headlights make streaks of light on longer exposures.


Roads 2011, no. 2

A layered composite of the same frames previously shown side by side. Various masking and combining techniques used in Photoshop to get this. Using Layers in Photoshop is a basic technique for collage, or whatever we want to call it.

What really caught my eye here were two elements: the overpass bridge, the way it both defines and breaks up the skyline at dusk; and the reflections of blurred lights on the hood of my own vehicle. My eye keeps going to those elements, more than to others. The overall effect is pleasing, though. It will interesting to try something like this as a video, again with long time exposed frames.

Hand-Made Art Book, No. 1 (2004)

I recently wrote about making chapbooks of poems, and my interest in making hand-made art books.

In 2004, when I was living outside Taos, NM, I made an art book as a birthday present for my mother. This was one of my first experiments in making a hand-made art book. I made it out of several disparate elements tied together mainly by their symbolic significance for my mother. It was an experimental project, using several different print media, designed to be sensually interesting, made as a gift.

Mom was already having serious Alzheimer's at this point, and I thought long and hard about what to do for her birthday. I wanted to do something I knew she would like, something creative, without being something she would find hard to understand or appreciate. So I made this small art book. Even if she could no longer understand a poem I had written, she would appreciate that I had written it.

The overall theme was travel and pilgrimage, and the book's title ended up being Journey. The book was thought through and assembled in November 2004.



The book is loosely bound with black sewing thread, making a simple two-point sewn binding, pierced at the fold. The cover was a sunprint cyanotype I made on a sunny day at my camper on the mesa above Taos, which I then embossed with leaf imagery using stencils. I signed and dated the book on the inside front cover.



The inside covers consisted of a sheet of translucent vellum printed with gold music notation, symbolizing Mom's long engagement with music as concert pianist and piano teacher. Inside that is a gold-threaded sheet of handmade purple mulberry paper, included for its sensuous colors, and because royal purple was a color that Mom liked. And because I just loved this paper: when laid beneath the gold-printed vellum, it made the gold music notation stand out vibrantly and seem almost like gold leaf laid on purple velvet.





The core of the book is three poems I had written while living in New Mexico, along with collages of photos I had made while traveling around the Southwest. Each center sheet was printed on my printer, front and back in separate passes, then folded in half and leaved together. Also, wrapping the center printed pages was a sheet I made that had B&W photos printed on one side, then on its inside had illustrations and text using scrapbooking materials such as rubber stamps and stick-on letters.



The center spread contains the book's title and colophon, worked into the photo collage that is the heart of the book. It may seem odd to put the book's title and colophon on the center spread, but this is an art book, and you can design it any way that seems appropriate. My thinking here was that the center spread was the book's main point of interest, the spread that would grab you and make you look at it slowly and carefully. So it was the "payoff," if you will, the point of arrival; therefore, it seemed appropriate to place the title there.





The end pages of course are like the front pages in reverse.



This is a one-of-a-kind art book, made for a special occasion. I found it among my mother's papers after her death in 2008, and kept it for my own collection. (I hadn't planned on that when I made it, but life took so many twists and turns in the intervening time that when I found it again, it seemed right to keep it.) During the turbulence of the past few years, between moving house and dealing with chronic illness, I misplaced the book, and found it again a few months ago. Finding it again was another reason I've been thinking about making hand-made books, hand-made paper, and so on.

This book was meant to be a sensual experience, incorporating tactilely-interesting papers, striking colors, poems, several B&W and color photographs arranged in collage layouts, and typography. I set the type as part of each photo collage, combining them in software on the laptop, choosing fonts that seemed poetically connected to the book's theme and content. So some fonts are calligraphic, and others are text blocks like old hand-set type.

(Mom loved the book, by the way. I mailed to her for her birthday, and she phoned me to thank me for it, fairly gushing with pleasure. Which pleased me immensely, as it meant the project had succeeded in its purpose.)

Stairway

Stairway

Every so often, browsing through my photo archives, an idea for an image comes to me, when a few elements start to come together in my mind. Even on roadtrips with planned subjects, I also shoot a lot of photos not as pure photos, but as stock images, or as elements for future Photoshop collages.

Every so often, when browsing through photo elements, an idea for a collage image comes to me. These are not really Surrealist images, but post-surrealist. They owe more to the influence of one of my favorite photographers, Jerry Uelsmann, who for many years has made post-surreal photo collages in his darkroom, working with many negatives and masks and exposures to create master prints of his visionary art. From the very beginning of my work with Photoshop, I began doing something similar, albeit in the primarily digital domain.

This piece, Stairway came together over the las few nights, as I was looking at recent photos. The river image is of Turtle Creek, my local beloved river. The stairs are from a mountainous city park in Portland, OR. The model is from an outdoors model shoot I did over a year ago.

I like the combined result for its synergy, the combined effect that creates something new out of the individual elements, taking the finished image in a direction none of the elements implied only by themselves. The river becomes a tiled path, perhaps, with a traveler walking along its surface. Or a wet pavement street, or waterway. The reflection of the stairs in the sky becomes perhaps a shelter, or another path entirely, or an echo of the basic forms.

Here's the original color image of Turtle Creek, that served as a base for this collage:



The idea of superimposing the stairs came along as I continued browsing through images. It seemed like a natural fit, and I worked fairly extensively to get the right positioning and layering effects to their final state. The model was almost an afterthought, but quickly became essential to the concept of the piece. I did create a new wave reflection of the person to superimpose over the water, and the stairs.

In making these photocollage images, I often end up working in B&W rather than color. That's partly because so many individual photo elements don't match up in color, due to lighting and location. But working in B&W is also partly about making a composition in unified tonal effects, with unified lighting and tones, which is easier to assemble in B&W. So, those are the technical reasons for working in B&W.

There are aesthetic reasons, as well. Partly the history of photography, not to mention gallery culture, still recognizes B&W images as more "fine art" than color images, most of the time. That bias is still present. More importantly, there is a pleasure in B&W imagery that is purely about shapes, compositions, forms, lighting, and sensuality. You are freed up in some ways to think outside the usual photographer's mental box, when you don't also have to deal with color.

There is something very sensual about B&W, a different kind of sensuality than color: more of artifice than reportage, more subject to creative mastery. B&W is inherently more artificial than a color snapshot—which is one reason it's taken to be more fine art than color, still—and as a more artificial artform, it shows the artifice, the conceptual toolmarks of the artist's imagination, visualization, and execution.

Another way of breaking out of photography's sensual box that I have been experimenting with lately is to convert a color image to B&W leaving only one key element in color. I find that monochrome color often works for this approach.

antler

antler bone found in the grass
speaks of lost deer rituals, their religion of seasons
and blood

dance of hoof and antler, horn and fur ruff
circle of apple trees full of bees
and the tender undying evergreens

horn-handed deer staff a dance ritual for young bucks
while old men sit blanket-wrapped watching
sweat-braced flanks they used to know

we rub our bodies with suet and red clay
we dance the deer in spring and autumn
becoming those bones found in the grass

edges of the field at dusk still full of bees
where deer stop to stare, then walk on
suddenly doubled with ghosts of the ancestors

CTA

Two photo-collages about the Chicago Transit Authority, riding the trains, the Blue Line especially, made in summer and winter 2004.


CTA

trains going by loud
click clack on the tracks—
mood of faraway


CTA II

Photo-collage makes a synergy of multiple images into one bigger image, one overall image. The parts become more than themselves, and the sum is greater than the parts. The individual images are impressions that bind together in an overall pattern.

The originals of these two collages, which were made in B&W, have been shown as large-scale prints in one or two group gallery shows, in Chicago and Minneapolis.

•

Going back through old materials, old prints, old files, rediscovering some art and music made over the past few years, both before and after the life-changing events of moving out West, then later moving back, and all that followed.

The first CTA remains one of my own favorite pieces. The background is a brushed steel background that I photographed and made into a texture. The images were all taken within a ten minute frame, originally in B&W, back when I was first beginning to make B&W images again, while waiting for the Blue Line to take us from downtown out to the northwestern streets. A hot, sunny day. The industrial beauty of the machines. The lines of details, the rush and roar of the electric trains.

Prayers

Prayers (2008), arrangement of photographs and digital prints

December 1st is World AIDS Day. Honoring this day is as much about ending prejudice against those who are living with HIV (we all know someone who is) as it is about education and prevention. The Red Ribbon symbol is everywhere, and if you see it now, you'll know why.

I was invited to submit my artwork to a World AIDS Day art and education gallery exhibit in Madison, WI, and six works were accepted. The connection was made by a friend of mine who is an artist, and who has lived with HIV some several years. He encouraged me to submit my work, and he also has some large oil paintings in the show as well.

The show is sponsored by the UW Health HIV/AIDS Comprehensive Care Program at UW Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin, and is part of AIDS Action 2008. The exhibit is described as: "The featured event of AIDS Action will be a community art exhibit relating to the personal, political and social aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic." The exhibition will be shown from December 1 thru 5, at Common Wealth Gallery, Madison Enterprise Center, 100 S. Baldwin St., Madison, WI. There's an artists' reception the last day of the exhibit, Friday evening, December 5, during which some members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus of Madison will perform a small group of unaccompanied songs.


Prayers

I've been photographing friends and acquaintances since 2000, as part of my nudes in nature series. I realized in going through artwork and photographs to submit to this show, that one thing that tied together many of my male nudes in natural settings was an attitude of prayer, of contemplation, of connection. I've never concealed the truth that much of my art contains mystical and transpersonal content; I've never pretended that I wasn't interested in mysticism, shamanism, and depth psychology. Naturally, your interested show up in your artwork. Yet as I was going through images to present for the exhibition, I realized that a great number of these photographs were thematically related, and the theme was prayer. So I gathered several prints together, arranging them intuitively until everything felt just right. The title of this new piece came so easily, it was almost comical in its obviousness: Prayers.

This is one of six pieces of mine that were accepted for the exhibit, and are now on display in the gallery.

•

One of Joni Mitchell's most memorable songs of recent years, for me, is Sex Kills from her album Turbulent Indigo, itself one of her best albums. Mitchell is known for her razor-sharp insights into world issues such as environmental degradation, social injustice, and violence. Sex Kills is a song about AIDS, about how love turns to death, about how the rich get richer while the poor die because they can't afford healthcare; and much more. It's a summation, a snapshot of evil, of how by our selfishness we destroy each other and the world we live on. Here is the song's first verse and chorus:

I pulled up behind a Cadillac,
We were waiting for the light,
And I took a look at his license plate,
It said, JUST ICE.
Is justice just ice?
Governed by greed and lust?
Just the strong doing what they can
And the weak suffering what they must?

And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
And sex kills
Sex kills

The anger in the song is, as usual for Mitchell, wound together with love. The observation of degradation is bound up with compassion. Surely we can do better than this; surely we can care for each other more deeply, and more sanely. Sex Kills is not just about AIDS, but AIDS is included in there.

•

I wrote a short poem some years ago, in which the dead and the living coexist, merge, and meet one another. I've posted this poem before, but I want to repeat it here, today, in honor of the circa 33 million who are now living with AIDS, and the over 25 million who have died from it, making HIV one of the greatest pandemics in human history.

involuntary words

little prayers we say,
little strings of words
like pearls around the necks of the dead,
little automatic movements of the eye
flicking towards half-seen things on the peripheries of vision,
hands curling around in warding signs;
out of darkness come the white trees, suddenly there—
we give a little exclamation, a puff of exiled breath,
and riding out with it float the white tongues of fear;
shimmering in green light,
the hummingbird floats above the pool,
we give a soft cry of pleasure
as its flickering iridescence vanishes;
small red leaves swirl about the mossy shelf above the water,
stirred by children’s unseen hands, little girl ghosts
who watch from the shadows and giggle;
alone and silent
while rain comes weeping down,
we speak quiet words over the stone,
pearls strung together by song,
a little laughter, a small child’s wide eyes;
and you, beneath the stone,
do you hear it? those little prayers
and unnoticed sighs; they ring for you through the silence,
the darkness, the silence, the voices of the soil,
the sounds of the living,
given to the dead.

Light and Space

If I were 20 now, if I had the chance to do it all over, to start all over again, I would probably go into architecture school.

I am constantly, vividly, viscerally aware of how light and air fill an enclosed or an open space. The way natural light moves on a surface, or in a room, is transcendently beautiful, with no other adornment. A bare wall, at the right angle to the sun, is beautiful all day long. Reduced to its purist forms, architecture is a container for light, and thus for spirit.


Santa Fe, NM

I might also work in interior design or landscape design. The goal being to create spaces for contemplation, quietude, meditation. I create these spaces for myself, most recently in my new home; I also gather them to me, as memories, in many places I've traveled to, or visited.

I like natural materials. I like wood surfaces that have been weathered by sunlight, rain, and time. White sunlight on grey cedar shingles. Light rain on whitewashed wood. I like the pure solidity of reinforced concrete, but also the aesthetic of chaotic weathering. A rust stain below a steel pipe on a concrete wall has spirit. Skin on stone.


Temperance River, MN

The color white, in design and architecture, is not a void. it contains all colors, and reflects them all. It responds to the changing light throughout the day and night. A whitewashed building on a Greek island's high hill. A white picket fence. A white chair under spreading trees. A white canvas tent on a high mesa after a light snow.




camp, Arroyo Hondo, NM

I like reflections. I am not found of mirrors, but I love windows, pools of water, glass, wet stone, and the they way they all reflect light. If I were to design a terrace, I would have inset lines and curves of moving water channeling through the stone pavements; narrow enough to be easily stepped across, but wide enough to reflect the sky. I once had a dream in which I was on a terrace made of red desert stone, into which had been incised narrow channels through which water was flowing, reflecting the clear blue sky with small white clouds; the overall shape of pattern was a labyrinth.


dawn, Flambeau River, WI

I like light to come through. Skylights over shower stalls in a high-roofed bathroom. Small rectangular windows at odd places in corners and clerestories. I have a photographer's eye for light—I have noted more than once that I am aware that many of my landscape photos are really photos of the sky—and if I applied that to a building, or a public space, light would always be getting in. Light-pipes to underground subway stations.


Taos Plateau, NM

We divorce ourselves, without imagining the consequences, from the natural cycles of night and day. We use artificial light even where we don't need it. We use harsh, direct light, because we imagine it to be more efficient and illuminating, simply because it is direct. We create enclosed spaces, indoors, all too often to block out the outdoors, the natural light, perhaps to prove our dominion and control over it.


adobe building, NM

Night finds a way to get in, no matter what. A single lamp is better than a brightly-flooded room. A candle in the right place, reflecting off the walls, is better lighting than a row of flourescent lights. We don't honor the dark enough. The shadows in a room, at night, are as important as the objects and angles that make them. They're very much alive.


Taos, NM

If I were 20, and had it all to do over again, I would probably go into architecture.

Music from My Mother's Piano 2

Yesterday I edited a few more improv pieces together from recent recording sessions with my mother's piano. The day was full of storms, heavy rain, lightning and thunder in waves, well into the night. The old house is now basically empty, except for the last round of cleaning. The piano sits alone in the large living room. The room's acoustics have changed without all the soft couches and chairs in it to absorb sound; it now has a much more live sound. In between all the severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, I was drawn to more abstract and atonal ideas that I had played.

When you record it doesn't always seem like genuine music: you're experimenting, you're trying an idea out, you're testing the limits of your technical ability to play what you hear in your head. So it's often a pleasant surprise that improvs that seemed tentative, in the moment, can come to seem like coherent compositions, upon later review.



Volcano

she disappeared between the gypsum trees

celestial road

I felt the mood of some of these pieces, when I was editing them—perhaps this was my mood anyway, and I was merely projecting it onto the music—to be wistful, bordering on sorrow, but never dramatized. There are images that emerge for me of celestial landscapes, of a loved one disappearing into the night mist, of missing them, but also of being aware of the immensity of the cosmos into which they've faded.

celestial road is assembled from two different one-minute improvs, heavily processed, then layered together. It's both modal and abstract. I got the sense of complementary voices, one very staid and moving forward implacably, the other very light and crystalline. I sometimes wonder if the stars don't sing like this. The effect created, for me, the feeling I get when I listen to some of Olivier Messiaen's more celestial compositions.

Collage

Collage is a set of techniques for assembling elements into a larger whole. As an artistic technique and process, it's a useful tool in visual art, in literature, and in audio and music.

The majority of the visual-art collage I've done for ten years now has been done in Photoshop. I can get PS to do what I want, including transparencies, that are effects often much harder to achieve within a physical medium. I have printed the results on various media, including giclée prints on watercolor paper, archival silver photo paper, standard archival photo paper, cardstock, and linen. With the newer inkjet technologies, you can print archival inks onto damn near anything.

I still like to get my hands dirty, though. Sometimes I draw or paint on photo prints. Sometimes I make a drawing or hand-written text, then scan it into the computer and mix it with photos and other drawings. Sometimes I rip things up and drop them randomly onto the scanner. Sometimes I rip them up, scatter them onto a table or floor, and photograph them. My current digital camera is 10 megapixels, which is more than adequate for re-photographing a physical piece to bring it back into the digital realm, to edit it some more. Or manipulate.

I like to involve indeterminacy in many of my artistic processes; I enjoy surprises, and one can discover new directions that one might pursue more intentionally by starting from chance.

I also create creative backgrounds, like hand-made papers. I usually do this in Photoshop, collaged from photos and/or things put on the scanner, sometimes heavily processed into graphic patterns that bear little superficial relationship to the original image. The scanner is like a big camera with a very narrow depth of field. I've put paper, rocks, feathers, leaves, and other things on the scanner, and made assemblages "photographed" by the scanner, which became parts of pieces, or backgrounds, or layers.

Many recent collages have been photomontages. I take many photos of the same scene, sometimes from many angles, then stitch them together. Sometimes the results look like assemblages, sometimes they look Cubist, sometimes you can't even tell it was a collage.

In audio, collage is commonplace since the invention of the sampler. The first generation of samplers were essentially short-period recorders that could be played back in various ways. Whole genres of both experimental and popular music have developed that are based on sampling. I began my own audio collage history with tape music compositions, slicing up bits of tape with a razor blade and taping them back together; this is classic tape music technique. Nowadays, I create similar pieces entirely in the computer, using audio recording and mastering software.

In literature, collage is a bit more dodgy as a subject. The cut-up technique developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin is well-known. More recent genres of short fiction and poetry have come to rely on similar techniques of indeterminacy and chance operations. I admit that I am not entirely sold on the results of many experiments in literary indeterminacy, although I agree with much of the theory (most of which is frankly borrowed directly from experimental music theory). It's one of those instances where the theory may be more inspired than the product. Sometimes indeterminacy is used far too casually, and as an excuse for sloppy thinking. All too often, in literary indeterminacy, the gimmick, once figured out, is not very interesting thereafter. Puzzle-box poetry is often very dull once you figure it out, and rarely re-read. Poetry ought to be more than linguistic engineering.

Collage relies on surprising juxtapositions for some of its interest. How does one go about creating surprising juxtapositions in written texts? The cut-up method, in its variations, is actually a good means to that end. Sometimes writing that deliberately de-centers both narrative and setting can be very good. Some of the postmodernist literary tactics have achieved good collage results, particularly in instances where normative narrative time can be represented as non-linear. A poetry of simultaneity is both possible and desirable. My point is that this can be achieved with deliberate intention, rather than only done by means of chance operations. The gimmick, if it is one, is less foregrounded, and more integrated into the work. Examples of successful collage technique in literature can be found in some of the shorter prose pieces of Samuel Beckett.

It might seem odd that collage works well for me in two out of three mediums, but that I remain suspicious of it in that third medium. This might be a personal blind-spot. But I do think it's a limitation in the thinking of many of the writers who have tried to develop and use collage methods and chance operations in their writings. It's actually very interesting to me how an artistic process that can be so successful in visual art and audio can so often fall flat in literature—or, worse, seem derivative and gimmicky. So many experimental writers seem to copy ideas and methods directly from artistic inventors such as Marcel Duchamp or John Cage, but without ever acknowledging their influence. Cage's own writings contain many innovations in textual collage that are direct precursors of postmodern poetry, but I have yet to run across a postmodernist literary manifesto that acknowledges this. Part of my suspicious questioning of literary collage lies in this apparent lack of awareness of the history of collage and indeterminacy. But then, literature has usually lagged behind art and music.

What I would suggest, then, is a fresh approach to literary collage. I'm not sure what that might look like. But if it does look like something that's been tried before, a sense of history and influence ought at least be acknowledged.