Bits and pieces:
Bits of paper provide hue and shape, the embedded words and images imbue the picture with humor, meaning, and irony. Sometimes I spend days searching through my cache of paper for a precise word, in the right size and the correct color. Poetry has always played a lively part in my artwork. I have incorporated my own poetry and sometimes the prose or poetry of others, like James Joyce and Abraham Lincoln . My Autumnal Haiku series, depicts scenes of the season in northern New Mexico with an embedded original haiku. Currently, I am working on an abstract series called The Coral Reef, and each of the collages in this series of twelve engages the viewer in the flow and mystery of the seen and unseen in the disappearing reefs. I arrived in Santa Fe in 2010, ready to begin a new chapter in life. I left Chicago behind, my big-shoulder city where I was born. Here, at the foothills of the Sangre de Christos Mountains, I found home; I established a new studio in my mid-town house and explored the art community. I embraced the color, the music, the fiery food, the intellectual enclaves. My furniture and art supplies were long delayed in arriving, but that did not stop me. I had my scissors and glue and I walked to the Plaza to collect tourist magazines and catalogs to create collages, using the same technique I had developed over a few decades but now imbued with the color around me—sky, aspen, pinon, ruddy earth. My collages are not typical, but I have found an audience here, as enthusiastic as the one I had in Chicago. I exhibit my work locally as well as around the world, even the White House. My online community has grown as well, and I have made connections globally. As I have found a home in the broad perspectives from New Mexico’s peaks, the power of the monsoons flooding the arroyos, the pinon fires in the homey hearths, these have found a home in me. Love and Peace, Deco |
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