The Art: Chuck’s Reflections

Using various kinds of paper, colored file folders, card stock, cardboard, and sometimes cut up pieces of my own second-rate gouache paintings, I experiment in any one piece, over and over again, with color, contrast, pattern, shape, and composition until I have found what to me feels like harmony, a balance of movement and stillness. 

In creating a collage, I do not intend to do anything but begin with the idea of an image and then follow the evolving piece, allowing it to speak to me about where it needs to go and what needs to happen next. The result is always different than the original conception, sometimes radically so. While I’m busy making and changing, cutting and shaping and pasting, an intuitive process is at work, mostly out of conscious awareness, and what emerges when the moment is right is always genuinely surprising: a visible expression of joy and delight. 

If the collages move you in some way, inspire something in you, then you and I have made a connection that humanizes by satisfying the human need to share and connect with other humans in a feelingful way. We are resonating together, feeling together, perhaps with joy, perhaps with delight, or perhaps with something else about the experience of being alive.