Drawings & Collage

The process of combining appropriated images, shapes, textures, and colors is largely improvisatory and intuitive — you keep placing and moving things around, or drawing and erasing or covering up, until something clicks and it feels right. As free improvisation was a key element of my musical life, my process related to drawing and collage feels quite similar, and equally gratifying. The end result, ironically, is a fixed composition, that is literally glued in place — much like what happens when free improvisors in music record their work. The process was purely improvisational, the resulting document is not. This kind of visual work to me is a kind of language, and like improvising musicians, every artist has their own manner of speaking, with different imagery and materials to which they are drawn, different signature moves that become stylistic identifiers. For me, the distinctions between collage, drawing, and mixed media are often blurry, but these pieces utilize paper as the primary substrate.