or as long as I can remember I’ve been collecting moldy, sooty, flood and fire damaged books. Also bits of metal, wood, rocks, screws, plumbing supplies, wrenches, etc. When I was a kid I got in trouble for soldering together “borrowed” kitchen implements and clock parts. Collage is a great break from painting and just as the daily practice of drawing gradually builds up the communication between hand and eye, in the same physical way, pitting a small piece of paper text against a hunk of wood or iron in collage is something you can practice and get better at. Arranging different size spheres on various size open planes, then various sized closed planes and so on over and over is almost endlessly absorbing. What I’m looking for – whatever the mathematical relationship is between the spheres is like something I already know but forgot or something lost that I think I know where I left it but then I keep losing it again. It took several weeks and thousands of combinations to arrange the balls of snakes in Axis, Falling Snakes, and Trick Snakes. I would twine them one-way and they would be wrong, then the next and the next and the next…wrong, wrong wrong. Then, suddenly, with an almost audible “click” they would be right and I had to get them down quickly before they slipped out of whack again. By learning the snakes I was also, for the future, learning the tangle of human limbs in the various fighting men drawings and paintings, the curves of the tree limbs in Revelations, the eddies of the water in Adrift and so on.

The starting point for the “Supplemental Air” series was a fragment of “dangerous chemical” sign that my neighbor left on the table in front of my studio, probably off one of the passing train-cars. The graphic looked right with a piece of Japanese text from a smoke-damaged book and some broken metal sewer pipe from the junkyard which suggested rocks so I cut some rusted tin for grass (or maybe fire) to go with the rocks and then made a bird with another bit of metal and a left-over black bird head which because of the rocks and grass/fire needed long legs. I knew what size and length the pieces of metal needed to be but I didn’t have any. Taking a break to walk over to the Fed-x box I spotted dozens of perfectly sized and shaped pieces of metal just lying in the street. It felt like winning the lottery, only better because I got to decide what the prize was. Later I found that they were tines flung off by the town’s ancient street-sweeper. The bird, now with legs, looked exactly right but also deformed and that, combined with the “dangerous chemical” graphic and the Japanese text led to the title “Minimata Bird”. Of course the crime committed at Minamata Bay is only one of thousands of ecological horror stories so, sadly, it doesn’t matter if you know the title.

Each piece has a story but it’s probably not the one you would guess or even one that I would have guessed when I started. One thing simply led to the next and the next and I followed with not much more thought than a dog following his nose through the woods.