120 Square Feet of Collages
I hope you don’t mind if we do a little story time, no tea involved sorry. For over a year I was involved in a project which consisted in the creation of a large scale triptych. One was made at first, but it had to be redone from scratch on new backings. Combining the one that was dismissed and the one which will be on display in DC by the end of this year (fingers crossed), the total surface collaged is over 120 square feet. I’ll show two out of three parts of the artwork that was dismissed here.
“Do your best, pray for the best, but try very hard not giving a damn about what is out of your control. Because in the end, all you can really control is how you react to whatever is thrown at you” - I had to learn this lesson on Stoicism the hard way, by putting a huge amount of work upfront, only to notice later I didn’t follow the brief and needed to start all over. My dumbass got too excited and didn't take the time to understand clearly enough the somewhat volatile desires of the person on the other side.
The way I naturally create usually never involves what other people want. It involves what I want. If you give me a vision (or input), I will feel it is of the highest importance to translate it in a way that resonates with the aesthetics and values held in my work. Wrong feeling but in a way, yeah, you can say my work is actually very selfish. This can be a recurring problem when doing commissions, because in essence, we usually drift from art to design. You cannot do exactly what you want, you cannot allow yourself to use only your creative intuition, you also need to apply reason.
Applying reason to create anything never felt mandatory to me as an artist, I’d always rather leave those tasks to a modern robot. I never saw anyone breathing life on a canvas with reason either, and my guess is that those who do will certainly produce soulless imagery. I wouldn’t say my final artwork is soulless either, damn it! There’s obviously still my signature in it. But it was all about balance in the end, understanding the purpose the artwork needed to serve, and the problem it was meant to solve.
You see, throughout art history we can find patterns. Patterns of artists who were summoned to solve high value problems. Some of those problems involved placing christianity as the world’s dominant religion, or creating fictional paintings to prove to the world that Napoleon was the greatest emperor to ever walk the earth, etc. Thank God I’m certainly not on that level, nor living in those much harder times.
But with this in mind, when doing any kind of commission, the only question you actually MUST ask is: “What problem does this project need to solve?” - Put your art aside, and use the response to push further questions down the road to help you narrow down the solutions you can bring. If you get a blank slate telling you to do whatever you want, a wise move would be to run away from the project as fast as you can. So a good approach would be to identify the problem, in the clearest and most transparent manner, and then propose a solution with the skills and aesthetics you have (or don’t if you’ve understood this wasn’t for you).
After surviving this hill of reason, I went on (a second time) to find the ways to solve the problem while still using my creative intuition. So I guess for this kind of work, reason first, be an artist later.
That being said, I’m thankful to have worked with some amazing people, who stayed amazing throughout the big bump. And also grateful to have found the energy to make a zine out of this process, documenting the key steps of the final artwork in Sniffin Glue Issue 04. Shameless plug, but if you can’t make a pilgrimage to DC to see the artwork in person later this year, at least you can bring the artwork to you by clicking on the image below and working your way through a few steps?
If you hold no feelings for the zine, I hope this article would’ve at least helped you in not making one of the dumbest mistakes in your art career. Certainly something I wish I could’ve read before I started working for others and not only for myself. Hard lessons learned, glue goes up regardless.
