collage – Page 14

Renovation

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Here is a house for Meg that doesn’t seem to fit into the series, perhaps because it wasn’t a “new build,” but a “renovation,” additions tacked onto an old black and white photo…

Here is David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway, 11-18 April 1986, #2. Several people mentioned that they thought of Hockney when they saw my “Houses for Meg” — a huge compliment to me, as Hockney is one of my favorite artists. His “joiners” are my favorite works of his: huge photo collages made up of hundreds of individual 4×6″ prints.

In this video Hockney talks more about the piece and its origins:

(I had no idea it was originally commissioned by Vanity Fair to illustrate Humbert Humbert’s drive across the southwest in Lolita.)

Here’s a 1988 feature of him returning to the site and showing how he took the shots:

Oh, one fun thing: when you zoom in on the collage the Getty website serves up a bunch of different chopped up .jpegs. I downloaded them and put them in an ImageQuilt and hit shuffle:

Filed under: David Hockney, collage

Houses for Meg

Friday, May 29, 2020

Diary collages for my wife, Meghan, whose birthday we celebrated yesterday. (She loves buildings and has a master’s degree in architecture… I think our son Jules got her eye.) I’m posting them as I go on Instagram, but I’ll be collecting them here, too.

A few said these reminded them of David Hockney — a huge compliment to me, as he is one of my heroes, and his “joiners” are a big influence on these pieces.

See more here.

The front page

Monday, May 25, 2020

Here’s our copy of yesterday’s front page of The New York Times, “compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them.”

For me, the most chilling detail is in the bottom right-hand corner:

“Continued on Page 12.” They listed 1,000 people — only 1% of the dead — and even those couldn’t fit on the front page. (Jason Kottke observes that if you visit the online version, it takes you ages and ages to scroll to the bottom of the page.)

A list, an assemblage, a word collage, and, in some ways, a piece of conceptual art: you don’t have to read it all to feel its impact.