About
It started with a cereal box.
I first tried my hand at collage when my daughters were 8 and 11. Both had taken a liking to Honey Nut Cheerios and were going through growth spurts. We were plowing through what felt like three boxes a week. I had a weird idea. What if, instead of throwing them out, I stashed them away until I had enough to make something out of them. One rainy Saturday afternoon I started cutting, just to see where it would go. This is where it ended up.
I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so I decided to challenge myself and see if I could take cereal boxes to the next level. “I wonder if I could do more than shapes. How about a person?” I chose the ultimate cereal box of my childhood: the Muhammad Ali Wheaties box, made out of nothing but Wheaties boxes. Just one problem. My kids weren’t down with that plan. They were too hooked on Honey Nut Cheerios to switch over to Wheaties. Thankfully I learned that people collect just about anything and most of it’s on sale on eBay. I bought a collection of 100 vintage Wheaties boxes. When the package arrived, I was like a kid opening presents on Christmas Eve. Alright, truth be told, I’m Jewish and never had that joy (I got Chanukah presents like socks or a corkboard, yippee), but if I ever got to open a Christmas present I imagine it feels something like that. One gem after another. Walter Payton, Mary Lou Retton, Bruce Jenner.
That piece took me almost 9 months, late at night, after everyone went to bed, including a few near all-nighters as I dialed in on getting his nose, his ear, or his boxing glove just right. It was like doing a really challenging puzzle, but I was making the puzzle pieces myself along the way.
I also love the challenge of only using the material I have. It makes it harder, but it forces even more creativity to fill the canvas with what is in front of me. I still work that way. I don’t buy more. I make it work with what I have, which often forces me to come up with more creative, interesting shapes.
I never use anything that’s truly valuable. Every comic comes from the dollar bin at my local comic book store. It’s all upcycled, giving new life to something that had served its purpose already. But it has to be the original material, for authenticity’s sake. There’s just no way to capture the actual look and feel and texture and imperfections of the original.
It’s all pop culture memories of my childhood. Iconic people, characters, products. I’m a pop culture kid of the 70s. I can still name any episode of the Brady Bunch in under 30 seconds. Test me.
Some people meditate, some soak in a hot tub, I do this. Even though it’s something most people would find insanely tedious, it relaxes me. It gets me in a flow state and shuts off my work brain.
Our daughters are grown now. They don’t eat Honey Nut Cheerios anymore and they’re not the reason things pile up around here. But I still stash stuff away. Vibrant material that evokes memories is what usually inspires my work. And because it all started with those two little girls and their cereal habit, the technique itself now carries memories of its own. I set out to capture my own childhood. Somewhere along the way I saved a piece of theirs too.
