Summer is never a relaxed, lazy, slow-moving time for me, but rather a season of high energy and intense artistic focus and productivity. It is usually a period when new ideas and directions are explored, and when ideas, already developed, coalesce into fully realized works and high production. The Summer Collages - 2002-2003 are a group of 13 collages done over two such summers.
These works incorporate elements and strategies that I have utilized in other collage series. As in The Mood Enhancer Series, I have continued to use the patterned paper from the insides of safety envelopes as my primary collage material. From the Winter Collages I have appropriated the heavy areas of gouache, the paper's patterning almost obliterated and existing only as a faint pentimento, hinting at other worlds and levels of meaning. From both The Valenciana Suite and the From the Dordogne Series, I have incorporated the stratified panels of contrasting colors and patterns, some dramatic, some subtle, to convey a shifting adjustment of mood and weight across the collage surface.
These collages do not so much explore new visual territory as amalgamate ideas from other collage series. The result is a kind of visual fugue where, I feel these ideas unite into their own look and identity.
The pleasure and freedom of joining absorbed and resolved ideas has resulted in a collage series that has a particularly unique ease and immediacy for me. These are qualities I associate with summer, unquestionably my favorite season.
James Zver
Los Angeles
December 2004 |
