When I was invited by Danville’s Community Arts Center to submit a piece for their annual “New Year, New Art” exhibition, I picked an homage to Cecil Touchon that I finished in December. Any observant artist who introduces cropped typography into a collage cannot be unaware of his significant body of contemporary work.
Touchonic Rites
collage on canvas
by J A Dixon
20 x 16 inches
currently on consignment
“Starting a New Year is always an invitation to dream.”
— Wayne W Dyer“Healthy striving is self-focused: ‘How can I improve?’ Perfectionism is other-focused: ‘What will they think?’”
— Brené Brown
Two-faced Janus scans both backward and forward, but, during the month that salutes his mythical duality, there is a third sight that also peers within. I have written about resolutions before. My essential take on the practice has not changed. This year, rather than focus on a checklist of objectives, I take personal aim at a phenomenon that plagues artists all along the spectrum of natural ability — perfectionism — a condition that tends to confound those who observe the creative class, as well as the people who wrestle with the disfunction. One of the most interesting scientists who writes about the subject is Brené Brown, PhD. She provides the clearest and most helpful understanding that I have discovered so far.
As dismissive as it may seem, it has been necessary for me to learn that I cannot care too much about what others think of me or think of what I create. For decades I have worn the hat of the designer or illustrator, which has sharpened my sensitivity to the perceptions and presumptions of others. Collage, for me, is the ideal antidote for perfectionism. For those of us who contend with the idea that something (anything! or everything!) must approach perfection, the notion of a “perfect collage” is absurd enough to defuse the fixation. There is no rule-book. There are no mistakes. There are no towering expectations. There is nothing upon which to heap all one’s perfectionist propensities. There is only the lure of investigation and the pleasure of discovery.
Gratuito
collage miniature by J A Dixon
5.375 x 5.25 inches
• S O L D
An atypical subject-oriented collage, but, with this one, I wanted to focus on something of favored interest to my daughter. Gift art is always an opportunity to put any ruts in the rearview mirror, especially at the cusp of a new cycle.
Sovereign Creature
collage miniature by J A Dixon
8 x 10 inches
collection of T Strock
Impure Thoughts
collage on postcard by J A Dixon
5.375 x 6.875 inches
Askance
collage artifact by J A Dixon
6.5 x 9 inches
“Once you establish yourself as an artist, heaven forbid you change the formula too much. Paradoxically, this goes even for artists who ‘broke molds’ on the way up. The German powerhouse painter Gerhard Richter has gotten away with working in many different styles. But the case of 20th-century French chameleon Francis Picabia is a warning. He’s been dead since 1953, and he’s still paying for the fact that his art didn’t look the same from decade to decade.”
— Jen Graves
Pre-Christmas sales have accelerated, and there is enough time for local folks to surprise someone with a collage miniature under the tree. Cadenza Forte found a home after six and a half years. The buyer said he wanted an example of my “classic style.”
Hmmm… I need to turn that over in my mind for a bit.
Cadenza Forte
collage artifact by J A Dixon
16 x 20 inches
• S O L D
“At Hallmark, the approach to creating emotional, relational communication for anonymous others is captured by the phrase ‘universal specificity,’ which suggests that people’s emotions are essentially universal, and that the industry can meet the nation’s social expression needs by customizing these core insights.”
— Emily West
There is, of course, nothing evil about the greeting card industry, but I have never felt comfortable with store-bought messages and decided to give them up early in life. After many years of making original birthday cards, I intensively produced over a thousand small, hand-crafted designs between 1999 and 2003. These visual investigations also served as personal greetings to people I knew. They provided the foundation for my entire approach to creating collage miniatures.
That Red Dress
collage miniature by J A Dixon
collection of B Palmer
Astermandarquoise
collage miniature by J A Dixon
collection of R Crabtree
Sweetly Terie
collage miniature by J A Dixon
collection of T Strock
Nested Pair
collage miniature by J A Dixon
collection of J Hellyer
“I have been producing collages for nearly fifty-five years, many of the early ones were done during long flights or in the waiting areas at airports.”
— Richard Meier
This season of the year finds many artists visiting family and friends. My spending time as a traveler without the suppletory activity of creating art makes for a less than satisfying experience. Visiting new places or returning to familiar haunts is noticably deficient if not combined with sketching or assembling ingredients for a collage experiment. Of course, we all need to relax now and then, sharing time with people who mean the most to us, but many of us also recognize a price to pay whenever the creative urge is asked to take a back seat for any length of time. What better opportunity than a change of environment to infuse our investigations with a fresh dose of spontaneity?
The sabbatical is a time-honored tradition for creative people, which brings to mind Cecil Touchon’s remarkable Paris Papers. But in contrast to this kind of planned artistic get-away, there is also much to be gained by a custom of fusing the influences of short-term travel with an ongoing artistic process. This makes me think of the highly publicized collage artwork of American architect Richard Meier. 
I saw something years ago which suggested the collage-making proclivity that runs parallel to his professional practice developed from the found material he acquired crisscrossing continents as an in-demand designer, and that many of the early works were created on airliners. I remember being impressed with his wooden case, crafted to accommodate several square working surfaces plus the modest number of accourtrements a collage artist requires to do one’s thing. No doubt his days of transporting blades and scissors on aircraft are part of the past. The status of being a celebrated architect has provided Meier ample “rare” opportunities to showcase examples of his collage. Whether or not the eventual significance of his work within the medium will prove commensurate with the attention it has already received remains a matter of opinion (like nearly everything in the art world).
Two years ago, I had the privilege to view a milestone exhibition of Kurt Schwitters originals at the Berkeley Art Museum. During my stay in Northern California, a brother-in-law was kind enough to let me set up a makeshift work area in his home office so that I could capture as collage experiments the flow of new stimuli. Please allow me to share two of those artworks for the first time:
Untitled (Back to California, part one)
collage experiment by J A Dixon
8 x 9.5 inches, not for sale
Untitled (Back to California, part two)
collage experiment by J A Dixon
8.5 x 7.5 inches, not for sale
“. . . the completion of a work is only ever an abandonment, a halt that can always be regarded as fortuitous in an evolution that might have been continued.”
— Paul Valéry
Whether one thinks of the anonymous medieval monk embellishing a pre-existing manuscript, of Leonardo da Vinci working on the surface of his older painting, or of George Lucas making alterations to the original Star Wars trilogy,
there is a long and sometimes controversial history of “refining” creative works already accepted as finished. I remember reading about Asian masters who thought nothing of making additions to artworks created in earlier eras. Apparently some art historians believe that halos were added to religious masterpieces much later. Duchamp did not draw those whiskers on the actual Mona Lisa, but he might have, had he been able to get away with it. What has all this to do with collage? Perhaps our entire genre came into being with the essential hunch that worthwhile art could result from revising something in contrast to its original purpose or frame of reference.
There is a wide spectrum to consider, if the subject under discussion is “altered art.” We might be talking about anchoring the concept for a collage on a singular appropriated image or transforming a mundane object into a new work of art. (L T Holmes recently shared a multi-part, personal tour of her Don’t Get Jittery On Me.) Or we might be referring to the simple idea of returning to a work already deemed complete and “writing a final chapter” to improve it. Think long enough about this topic and you may ask yourself whether any artwork is ever really done. Going back to Leonardo and Lucas for a moment, both turn up from time to time in attributions that suggest they also may have altered a version of the Valéry quotation more pithy than the poet most likely ever expressed.
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” — Paul Valéry
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” — Leonardo da Vinci
“A movie is never finished, only abandoned.” — George Lucas
Forgive me if all of this undue rambling merely serves as an opportunity to highlight two “finished” collage artworks that I recently chose to revisit. Both examples also illustrate the complications of visually comparing two images created with different digital devices. After writing about a corresponding issue last week, I have since discovered S Caswell-Pearce’s related words from an April entry at paper with a past. My images for Rhapsody with Fever Chills demonstrate the same scanner/camera differential, although the scan of the new version is a better rendition of the artwork’s strong complementary effects. (This piece is currently on display with the “Seeing Red” exhibit in the McKinney Conference Center at Kentucky’s Constitution Square Historic Site.) The digital documentation of a revised Broken Qualifications, having shared the original version previously at this site, became a bit more challenging the second time around, given the addition of three-dimensional ingredients. At any rate, neither piece had ever felt fully resolved, although I had no specific plans to “reopen the case” until I made a broader reassessment of my inventory. Did I enhance them, ruin them, or just squander my time? You be the judge.
Rhapsody with Fever Chills
collage on paper by J A Dixon
7.5 x 10 inches, available for purchase
Broken Qualifications
collage/assemblage by J A Dixon
6 x 8 inches, available for purchase
The Substance of Her Nature
collage miniature by J A Dixon
5 x 7.25 inches
(currently on consignment)
The Essence of His Inquiry
collage miniature by J A Dixon
5 x 7.25 inches
(currently on consignment)
