Learn to Work Anywhere
The Paris Papers - October, 2013
October 30, 2013 - Now returned from Paris and looking back over the trip I thought I would write down a few things to help me remember them later. My initial idea for this trip aside from the hope of enjoying some time away with my wife Rosalia, was to see what it would take to work on the road.
This meant traveling with only our regular tourist gear then setting up something of a studio, acquiring the supplies needed from a local art store and then going out and hunting down materials for creating collages.
I had some ideas in mind as far as the kind of collages I wanted to make but was open to working on whatever came to me inspired by the materials that I found along the way. I did acquire some interesting antique and vintage materials such as 1960's MATCH magazines, old books, journals and hand written documents but took an interest in advertising posters found around the city walls and in the Paris Metro.
We found it quite tiring (at least I did) to go out for more that a few hours a day seeing the city and its sites. It was very nice therefore to have the activity of producing artworks over morning coffee and day old baguettes with jam as a kind of recreation that did not require slogging around the city with weary joints. While happy to have a private apartment at 11 Rue Roger off of Rue Deguerre for a month, it was a 4th floor walk-up (ground floor is 0) with no elevator so we got our stair master workout on a daily basis. I thought I would get used to it but it was a struggle to the end.
Working under these conditions as an roving artist working with whatever came to hand, I ended up inventing a few new ways of working for myself that later, back in the home studio inspired a new body of painting works for quite a while. So if you are feeling kind of stuck maybe it is time to go out on an art adventure. It definitely paid off for me and I have gone out on a few of these excursions since then.
Most artists, if they have a medium they can work in that is mobile, can travel around and set up studio anywhere in the world. In my own case, once I got back home, I mounted the collages on watercolor paper and sent out to some of my dealers and then have made a number of the compositions into paintings in the following years.
The above, for example, was one of the first paintings made based on one of the compositions Fusion Series #3438 (above) from Paris which later was commissioned by the amazing Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons fame and my design ended back in Paris on the fashion runway in 2018 at COMME DES GARCONS HOMME PLUS Fall Winter 2018.
I ended up making more that 70 collages during that month of October, took a lot of photographs and it would have been smart of me if I have kept a written diary (but I didn’t) Later, when home, I made a number more collages over the next couple of months using the materials I brought back and a lot of asemic writings in an antique journal I found as well as several paintings based directly on these collage compositions.
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