juxtaposition – Page 2

Rothko vs. moon landing in *Everything That Rises*

I become a little possessed when I read Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. Weschler finds threads between images and shows those images in juxtaposition. Once you start looking this way, you start seeing convergences everywhere.

Early Rembrandt vs. late Rembrandt in *The World Through Blunted Sight*

Books — especially hardcovers that lie flat on a table — are the perfect medium to show such juxtapositions. The pages face each other, like a showdown. The gutter in the middle is a natural break that makes the argument. When you close the book, the images press up against each other.

These are just three random books I happen to have read this week. But after reading them, I’ve noticed a change in my noticing. Some detector has been tripped.

In just the past 24 hours, I took these 3 photos with my cameraphone:

A page from a fan’s copy of *The Steal Like An Artist Journal*

*A Peanuts* board game my sons left on the coffee table

Some juxtapositions are uncanny, some a little farfetched. It’s easy to get carried away. “Sometimes I think I may be getting a little ahead of myself,” Weschler writes, “but the world does keep showing me these pictures.”

The art of collage, for me, is mostly one of contextomy and juxtaposition: you put two things next to each other that aren’t really supposed to be together and you get a new thing. (1 + 1 = 3.)

I’ve been obsessed lately with the simplest cut: what’s the least amount of cutting or folding or editing that you can do for maximum effect?

I really got thinking about this when a woman in one of my workshops made the newspaper headline collage above. (An exercise from The Steal Like An Artist Journal.) It was so simple and funny it was like a gag out of a Nancy comic strip.

For a more visual example, here’s a picture of a sunset and moon that I took at the same time, but edited together with Instagram’s simple Layout program: