Work, Images, and Notes

Collage, she says (via Joan Didion), is about “eliminating possibilities.”

Not creating them.

Eliminating them.

This is heresy.

We’ve all been taught that collage is the glorious landfill of the imagination—a democracy of fragments where Victorian botanists drink with Soviet engineers while saints grow antlers and everyone gets invited to the revolution. Glue is freedom. Scissors are liberation.

No.

Glue is commitment.

The first fragment hits the paper like the opening move in a chess game played against history itself. Suddenly half the universe is unavailable. The second piece arrives carrying an axe. By the fifth you’ve accidentally murdered seventeen perfectly good collages that will never exist.

This explains why my studio often feels less like an artist’s workspace than a crime scene.

Every shelf is stacked with extinct futures. Cabinets of botanical engravings. Medical atlases. Rusted hinges. Dead books. Broken rulers. Anonymous photographs. Tiny brass mysteries that spent a century pretending to be hardware before waking up one morning as theology.

People sometimes ask where my ideas come from.

Wrong question.

The ideas are everywhere. They breed in boxes. They reproduce in flea markets. They emerge from recycling bins already dressed for opening night.

The real work is deciding which ones don’t get to live.

Somewhere in another timeline there’s a version of me who made every possible collage. His studio stretches to the horizon like Borges’ Library of Babel. It’s unbearable. Every work contains everything. Nothing has any weight because nothing was sacrificed.

Meanwhile, back in this universe, I’m trying to build objects that feel inevitable.

A single botanical engraving enters the composition and suddenly the rusted hinge is no longer a hinge. It’s a clavicle. It’s a gate. It’s a fossil. It’s the memory of industry trying to photosynthesize. A painted branch mutates into an artery. A bird becomes architecture. A flower quietly starts impersonating an explosion.

The fragments don’t illustrate ideas.

They infect each other.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become obsessed with metamorphosis. We talk as though transformation is about becoming something new.

It isn’t.

It’s about losing the possibility of remaining what you were.

Maybe every collage is just evolution with an X-Acto knife.

The wall belonged to a new café at 5007 Ave. du Parc. The brief was warm, playful, welcoming. The practical constraints were less romantic: no food imagery, a high exterior façade, old graffiti, corrugated metal, an awning, full sun, sidewalk slope, wind, lift logistics, public visibility, and the fact that every drawing made on a computer becomes a slightly different animal once it has to live on a building.

So the idea became a garden.

Not a polite botanical illustration garden. More like a storefront dream-garden. Flowers rising out of a deep blue-green field. Leaves climbing the façade. A hummingbird in the upper right, small and bright and slightly miraculous. An evil eye tucked between the blooms, watching the street without shouting at it. Red from the building held in the composition, so the mural would not feel pasted on, but grown out of what was already there.

Before the lift, there were sketches. Mockups. Colour studies. Scale drawings. Printouts with grids and arrows and little notes to future-me, who would soon be sweating above Avenue du Parc trying to remember why past-me thought this was all very clear.

Then came the actual wall.

This is always the moment where the design stops being an image and becomes a negotiation. The lift only lets you reach so far. The sun erases one side of the painting and turns the other into stained glass. The wind taps the basket just enough to remind you that gravity is not a theory. The corrugation breaks every line into ribs. The building says: nice plan, now improvise.

So I freehanded it.

Not recklessly, but bodily. Looking at the prepared design, then looking at the wall, then letting the flowers change scale and the leaves find their way across the surface. The original digital composition stayed there as a map, but the painted version had to become more alive, more irregular, more responsive to the strange vertical fact of the façade.

By the end of the second day, the old grey-black upper wall had become a field of red, teal, pink, yellow, cream, green, orange, turquoise. A little public garden for coffee, neighbours, pedestrians, and whoever happens to look up while walking down the block.

I’m proud of this one.

Proud not because it is perfect in the sterile way a mockup can be perfect, but because it survived the translation into weather, height, labour, logistics, and street life. Because it feels like a painting that belongs to the building now. Because the café owners trusted me with their façade, and because for two days a wall became a problem we solved with colour.

More murals, please. More strange surfaces. More buildings with their own opinions. More small acts of public blooming.

Here’s a version that keeps your structure but lets it slip its leash a bit—more velocity, more heat, without losing the intelligence underneath:

⸻

There’s a problem that keeps pacing the studio at night, knocking things over, refusing to sit:

how to make an image that can hold contradiction without immediately trying to clean it up, file it down, turn it into something polite.

This piece—finished, named, pinned to the wall like a specimen this week—didn’t begin with a subject. Subjects are too obedient.

It began with a rule: build depth that isn’t fake. No painted illusion, no Renaissance window. Actual depth. Layers you could pry apart with a knife. Time not depicted but trapped in the glue, in the seams, in the slight misalignment where something resisted being placed.

At first glance, it behaves. A frame. Ornate, a little too ornate. Gold-tongued, whispering “painting,” “history,” “value,” all the usual passwords to get past the guards.

But the frame isn’t neutral—it’s a decoy, a salesman, a liar with good manners. It tells you how to look. Inside, the work quietly refuses to comply.

Printed fragments. Reflective scraps. Adhesive scars that never quite disappear. Small objects clinging on like barnacles.

Spoons keep showing up—domestic, slightly warped, catching light like unreliable witnesses. Circles drift through the field—lenses, portals, surveillance devices, who knows—trying to stabilize the image and failing, beautifully.

Some passages pretend to be architecture. Others give up and collapse into rubble.

Nothing lies flat. Even the image has weight, has edges, has a body that interrupts you.

What’s really happening is a turf war between systems:

order trying to impose itself on accumulation

refinement getting dragged down into excess

the domestic leaking into abstraction

the historical frame pressing its face against a surface that won’t stay still

The materials remember where they came from. You can’t launder that out.

Commercial print still hums with its original purpose. Ornament still wants to decorate something obedient. Utility objects still carry the ghost of use.

They don’t dissolve into composition—they argue. They stall. They push back.

So the work isn’t composed so much as brokered.

Each element makes a demand: look here, move this way, recognize me, don’t erase me.

The process becomes a long negotiation, sometimes a standoff, sometimes a fragile truce, until something emerges that feels less like a decision and more like a necessity.

And underneath all that: attention. Or the lack of it.

We live in a flood of images that slide past the eye like oil—instant, frictionless, already resolved before you’ve even registered them.

This thing resists that. It slows you down. Forces your body into it. You have to shift, catch the light, track what sits in front of what, realize you missed something, go back.

Meaning doesn’t arrive. It builds. Or it doesn’t.

That’s where mixed media stops being a style and starts being a method of thinking.

Not a collage of materials, but a collision of logics.

An image that behaves less like a picture and more like a place you have to move through.

This piece is another small escalation.

Tempting Temporality

2008

the image doesn’t hold still

it slips—

between a hand and a fruit

between a body and its echo

between something sacred and something already discarded

everything is mid-collapse

or mid-becoming

(which is the same thing, just named differently)

there are too many images here

they press against each other

like voices in a room where no one agrees on the language

a girl turns

a heart burns

a machine remembers something it was never meant to keep

paint drips like time refusing to behave

like gravity trying to write a sentence

you think you recognize something—

but it’s already been covered

cut

replaced

forgotten under another layer

desire lives here

but it doesn’t land anywhere

it just keeps moving

attaching itself to surfaces

then abandoning them

this was before I knew what I was doing

which is to say

this was when I was closest

nothing resolves

nothing needs to

the image wants to disappear

and takes its time doing it

—

Children are not confused by complexity. They are confused by condescension.

After years of making public art for schools, I’ve learned that young people respond most strongly to work that trusts their intelligence—work that invites curiosity rather than simplifying the world for them.