The Artist Must Collect

I collect images from everywhere and have hundreds that are my favorites from over the last 20 years or so. When I start with a new body of work, I sift through them all, which is what I have been doing recently.

Often selecting and collecting an image is a clue to some as yet unrealized work or layer of a work of the future, a kind of map that I might follow in some way. Sometimes the image may have some uncanny reference to one of my own completed works, sometimes it's just satisfies a particular aesthetic craving for a colour or form or pattern or composition or feeling or metaphor. Sometimes I don't know why the image is holding my attention, speaking to me in such a strong way that it stays in the collection. The random juxtapositions when I sift through the images can suggest new entry points too. I have photocopies and drawn some onto transparencies that I will project onto surfaces. I am about to do that.

Thank you artists, photographers, writers for your inspiring images and words that I have mixed in with some of my photos and drawings below.

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