Yamabushi Collage and Post-Modern Expression
Collage as a art-form has been practiced for a long time in a variety of formats. The Post-Modern perspective involves using old media re-purposed into new media. The new media is current in perspective but still has the flavor of it’s origins. By using the fossils of the past to speak to current issues you can invoke a sense of historical perspective. Since so often the victors write history and half the story has never been told, the purpose, of the art, is always to illuminate that hidden path. Art made in that universe, lurid, unafraid, idealistic, and revelatory.
Collage grants the artist that immediacy to attack the visual problem. To piece it out, much like a graffiti artist develops a design slowly bringing all the elements of style together. That unifying energy that flows unseen but interlocking throughout the work of art. Lets call it a style web, it is woven throughout. The unseen hand that displays the heart of the artist. What is he or she really trying to say? The style web shows how well the artist has done the job. How effortless it looks everything in it’s proper place, the mastery of juxtaposition. The skills to pay the bills, it has to show without showing. The only way to achieve this is by doing. Working through design problems becomes fun when you have true confidence in your image making. The art becomes a second language like Jazz. You just let it flow through you. Easier said than done but isn’t that the whole point. The true master collagist just puts the images together that go together. That sense of placement , the artist’s eye, that is where the mastery resides.
The process is an important secret of the artist. The road map through the work involves the how. The artist’s secret formula to image generation is the magic. Collage art is driven by your source material. The effort one goes through to procure source material is truly never ending, yet finite. In collage you need vast image banks that takes years to accumulate. The search, the training of the eye to see what you need. The foresight to see what you might maybe need. All becomes automatic and second nature as you scour all your source spots. Where you find the pictures is important, you need a constant supply. The type of images you collect should be dictated by primary needs. You are looking for components, pieces to make it whole. You either start from the inside and work out or the outside and work in. You need the inspiration and intuitiveness to get the spark started. Once the seed is planted the artist just coaxes the plant to bloom. I like to get a sense of the joy, that’s what I chase, the addictive joy of image creation, all my visual children nurtured into creation by me. That’s what artists do, they try to share their joy and make sense of the pain.
