introspection

gun control

Sometimes I get a bit political about things that impact on me. Violent crime is pretty scary here with murder at very scary proportions. This collage was just a reaction to all the horrible stories one hears about and reads in the media on a daily basis.

cinnamon girl

We wear a coat

2

Curry flavour

Whimsy

Whimsy - the quality of being quaint,odd, or playfully humorous, especially in an endearing way. An idea that has no immediately obvious reason to exist. Like Fiona Apple singing "Frosty the Snowman", like the idea of mail art, like a puppy. In my opinion there's not enough whimsy in the world.

birds

Its amazing how often birds appear in my collages and also in many of the collages I view on line. I must admit we have a soft spot for them and go through at least one 25kg bag of wild bird seed a month. Our garden is surrounded by trees and we get a wide range - mainly small birds like doves, sunbirds, mannikins and weavers. During the winter we also get those weird trumpeter hornbills and of course, that most typical suburban bird, the hadedah.

voyeur

How do you paint without using paint. This is an experiment to try and use collage to achieve a painterly effect, blurring the hard edges of collage to achieve a softer, romantic, classical feeling.

bird feeder

cool blues

eclipse

In honour of the Lunar eclipse that took place last night in the Southern Hemisphere, here's a collage with a lunar theme called "moon blues". Spent last night going in and out the house, driving the dogs mad, while I kept track of the progress of the eclipse. Well worth it. Brilliant.

bird

Winter in the Eastern Cape. A clear blue sky, the smell of dust and burning grass in the air, and a bird silhouetted on a Euphorbia branch.

Dollar Brand

I don't really do much in the way of digital collage. I enjoy the challenge of cut and paste - trying to achieve a layered composition by the relationship of pasted images. This is however, something I did some time ago as one of a series on SA musicians. If you look closely, you can see that I relented in the end and pasted on some extra pieces so it still ended up as an old school collage. This weekend it was posted as a piece of mail art to Roland Halbritter in Germany.

Just out of interest, Abdullah Ebrahim is one of the foremost jazz pianists to come out of South Africa. Early on in his career, he was known as Dollar Brand. If you look closely at the collage, you can see an image of a metal shop sign advertising a brand of cigarettes called Gold Dollar. This sign, salavaged from a rural Transkei trading store, now hangs in my studio. It is very beautiful and evokes memories of 1950s Africa, when Ebrahim started his career. If you get the chance, listen to "Mannenberg" or "Blues for a Hip King" - sublime.

Clouds

With a week of heavy rain and a near flood, water flowing 2m over the Nahoon dam wall and the beaches strewn with debris, I suppose weather has been on my mind.

paperback romance

One of my latest favourite creations. I just love those old illustrated paperback covers. In my long lost youth I was addicted to the writing of John D. MacDonald, Edward S. Aarons and, of course, Richard S. Prather. I was looking at a pile of these books recently and had a brief epiphany - I could use them for my collages! So, this is my new enthusiasm and I'm quite excited to do a whole series of them, also inspired by the paintings of James G. Davis, who does this weird, figurative dreamlike stuff.

road trip

Have you ever had one of those days when you want to jump in your car, fill the tank and just hit the road for places unknown. Well, today's one of them so jump in the back, there's plenty of room!

afrojazz

Listening to Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges play the blues, looking out of my studio window as the rain falls in sheets. Thought this might be an appropriate image.

comic style

I love comics. Well that's a no brainer as I work as a comic artist all day long. However, sometimes one needs to take a visual step back in order to appreciate just how beautiful and appealing comic art can be. I've had this manga character lying around for some time but only when I juxtaposed her with an "uncomic" background did I get the full effect of her artistic appeal. Hope you think so too.

Symbology

Isn't it interesting how we read meaning into everything? Gestures, expressions, symbols,letters, icons; and the juxtaposition of these. How do we ever communicate when all this is open to interpretation. However you understand this collage is probably not what I wanted to communicate!!

Another car

Been off line and struggling so here's a car collage in the meantime.