Patrick Williams | kind of combined

Product | Process

I made a collage (left) based around a sequence of 8" x 8" sections from 6 of my 12 drawings (right).

I chose to place all of the drawings in a sequence within a space they filled completely in order that I would have equal space to fill with other things after I removed 6 of the drawings. As I worked, the grid like sequence broke down somewhat, and I found myself most interested in stretching spaces among the cropped drawings and places left blank.

I focused on maintaining the angles and curves present in my drawings and losing the boundaries among the separate drawings.

The collage includes newsprint, paper towels, paper soaked in ink, charcoal, and water, xeroxed photographs, a Polaroid, pages from books and magazines, and basswood. It is approximately 50" x 16 1/4".

After choosing the sequence of cropped drawings I planned to use, I started going through some old books and magazines I had lying around for some images that seemed like they could work with the sequence I created. Among the books and magazines were a Scientific American from the 40s, an old, brown Japanese Manga book called "Reggie," a book about the microscope, and Man and His Body, a book I found in the piled of deaccessioned give away books the Library school use to use as a practice collection for catalogers. I also found a photograph I had picked up somewhere in North Carolina that showed two women being photographed. It is one of many photographs I have collected that very prominently feature the photographer's shadow in the foreground.

I tore out three or four pages I found interesting and headed back to the sixth floor of Perry Casteneda Library to work with these images in the copy machine, zooming in, generating distortion, and focusing on specific parts of the images.

After I got home, I put the copies aside for a couple of days and starting playing around with crushed-up charcoal, india ink, glue, and water to see what kinds of textures and values I could apply to scraps of paper (and later, to some of the copies I had made). I was hoping to get some pieces that were similar to the values in my cropped drawings. At one point I began submerging whole sheets of paper into a pan half full of water and dropping ink into the water. The ink made some interesting patterns on the surface of the water that became something very different when they reached the paper and ultimately dried.

I applied crushed charcoal to glue-treated paper and made drawings with a bent piece of basswood coated in charcoal dust.

I spent several days gluing things to and tearing things off of my sequence of drawings. I tried to reinforce the angles and curves in my drawings as a means of breaking through (or obscuring) the gridlike nature of the sequence of cropped drawings.

I included pieces of the other 6 of my 12 drawings in several places, and repeated some parts of the drawings in the sequence I selected.