Dear Friends,

In my first letter to you, I shared a collage poem, and remarked on how interesting (and tedious) the process of creating these can be. Let me stress the tediousness: Imagine flipping through a stack of The New Yorker magazines, pages of mostly 10-point text with few photographs and illustrations to punctuate the browsing. (I subscribe, this is all the material I have readily available to work with right now.) My eyes dart across the pages, looking for something that grabs my attention; I don’t know what I’m looking for. I flip through the pages, back to front, then front to back, from one issue to the next, then repeat. Maybe if I were better at this, I would have a system, a method, a set of rules to organize my quest. After several minutes, I find it difficult to focus, and I start to lose patience. Eventually, I do find words and phrases that ignite some dormant ideas. With each fragment collected, exponential possibilities build. Images and words form a kind of static electricity. Hopefully, the glue stick is not the only substance holding the poem together. Ergo, “Purgatory in the Spring”:

The power of collage, in part, comes from the juxtaposition of different, unexpected, and sometimes contradictory elements to create new meanings. Visual collage, especially, can bring into the formulation layers of references to contexts, eras, histories, stories, and authors attached to each visual fragment. For example: Judith, wearing a facemask (cuz COVID), beheads the dickish Holofernes in a necktie, while a languid Philip Guston figure observes passively, smoking. Granted, there’s some esoteric insider artworld play going on for the benefit of my art school pals – but the point is that images (and poems, films, books, songs, et cetera) get denser and richer through the accumulation of such references.

The New York Times just posted an interactive visual essay looking back at the invention of collage in 1912 by the artists working in Paris known as the Cubists (Picasso, Gris, Braque & Co.). Or, see how Romare Bearden (1911-1988) used collage to capture Black life and culture in the U.S. during the era of the civil rights movement.

Lately, I’m drawing clusters of lawn signs, a different kind of assembly of symbols and words. These emerged from periods of unfocused doodling, pushing through to my hand from some murky place in my brain. Not surprising that they would. Where I live in Vermont, the visible signage in the environment is understated because 1) there are strict zoning laws prohibiting excessive signs and billboards, and 2) it’s an overwhelmingly rural place, so what the hell would you need a sign for anyway? In this context, lawn signs assume more visual prominence in the landscape, and the past several months have been a boon for displays of lawn signs, from the primary campaigns to the tragedies of COVID-19 and the social unrest following the murder of George Floyd to the presidential campaign. I observed the typical slate of signs, mostly statements of political affiliation or solidarity with social issues. These lawn signs could do other things, too. My doodles pose some questions: What if these signs held messages that were a bit more pedestrian or ambiguous? What if some of these signs then came together, creating new kinds of messages for us? What if my lawn messages mixed with my neighbors’ lawn messages to assemble a wonderfully spatial poème de la ville?

Lastly, the many faces of 2021. And it’s only January 29th. I’ve pulled many more faces since I drew this. Our border collie, Jasper, seems unfazed.

I wonder what faces you’re making as you read this...

With gratitude,

Jeremy