The collage/mixed media projects I am working on now are purely additive. I began the series by cutting up magazines, once again Interview, into strips of text. I used these to form the background by gluing them side by side and end to end in a random fashion. I had experimented in the past with strips of paper that I made by running magazines through a shredder but was frustrated by the randomness of the strips' contents. I liked the idea that each strip of paper containing text added a layer of meaning to the image. I also appreciated the strange juxtapositions that occurred as I put them together. And probably most interesting to me was the fact that I could not keep from reading each strip of text as I applied it. I was fascinated by the places my brain went as I worked.
As I have continued working with the text strips, I have focused more on connecting the content to the image. For example, I painted a self portrait last week and made my skin out of text from a book about the various aspects of dreaming. I am currently working on a portrait of a young woman who is a movie buff. I am cutting my collage materials from a dictionary of movie quotations. I am really enjoying reading bits from It's a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peter Pan, Tootsie, Jaws... and the list just goes on and on. It has enriched the creative experience for me and I hope it will do the same for the finished product.