Darshana-India

Paper collage on stretched canvas

My Process with Collage– “Painting with Paper”

One of the things I often hear from people viewing my collages is “This is all paper?! This isn’t painted?! I can’t believe it!”

My collage work really is in a sense painting with paper. I use the same principles of color, value, design as I do in my paintings but instead of paint my medium is paper.

The papers I use vary from plain brown wrapping paper, newspaper, tissue paper, origami paper, scraps of painted paper, to handmade papers from Japan, Korea and Nepal.

I build up layers with cut and torn paper on stretched canvas, using a matte medium to adhere, coat and seal the paper. Many of my collages have hundreds of individually cut or torn pieces of paper built up to create images on the canvas. I also scrape away. I use scraping as a kind of excavation tool, after building up layers I will scrape away a layer or two in an area to let what is underneath emerge, a bit like an archeologist digging and scraping away. This part of the process can be so surprising and very intuitive.

A question I get often is “How did you come to doing collage?”
Perhaps it’s because when I was a baby my parents and I lived in a tiny apartment so my parents built a screen to put around my crib, which was in their bedroom. My mother cut out Matisse-like shapes and put them on the screen for me to look at, it could be that.

I’ve always loved paper, the colors, textures, patterns, tones–the feel, look, even at times the smell. It’s a very sensual medium. From a very young age I loved to experiment with collage. There’s an alchemy involved, finding how the papers interact with each other, when layered or put next to each other, or scraped away that can be quite magical.

“How do you have the patience?” Is another question I get after a close up look at the hundreds of little pieces of paper it can take to create a work.
Well, I find it very meditative when I’m in the flow. I lose all sense of time and I’m completely in the present moment, there can be such a sense of peace. Of course it can be very frustrating when I’m not in the flow and huge sections get furiously and meticulously scraped away and I start again. But for the most part there is a sense of the picture having a life of it’s own, that I am a collaborator in the process and when that works through me it is a joy to create!