Collage-A-Dada

Welcome to Collage-a-Dada, a project born in January 2013 as the result of a New Year’s resolution. My primary medium has been acrylic paint and other mixed-media on canvas, but after years of feeling inhibited and confined, I promised myself I would take a vow of freedom from my constraints. This freedom led me here, to where I dissect long forgotten pages from antique and mid-century books and magazines, and reassemble the contents to create montages reminiscent of old “B” movie stills. The real and logical are reanimated into something more tantalizing and sometimes disturbing. This blend of random images and spontaneous placement is a marriage that combines beauty, ugliness, humor, and disquiet. The result is a portfolio of images that invites the viewer on a phantasmic journey to where the macabre and vagary are commonplace.

Collage-a-Dada was named such in honor of the Dada art movement which began in Zurich Switzerland in 1916, and the group of men and women who paved the way for the Surrealist movement which followed. While Dadaism was born out of the negativity surrounding World War I, the Dada reference here is a response to what today’s mainstream deems acceptable and normal. While many actions of the past have become, rightfully, “politically incorrect,” we have entered a time when the edges of political correctness have become blurred. What is right and acceptable to some is clearly wrong and disdainful to others.

I am forever indebted to the great minds of so many of the brilliant artists in both the Dada and Surrealist movements (Marcel DuChamp, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Man Ray, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Dorothea Tanning, Frida Kahlo, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, to name a few). I also have to thank Luis Buñuel, Lewis Carroll, Sydney Newman, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Zenna Henderson, William Castle, Mary Shelley, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for planting the seed early on. They have intrigued me since I was able to have rational thoughts.

If you are interested in purchasing any of these pieces, or in a commissioned piece, please contact me. Questions and comments are appreciated.