Paper, scissors, glue…simple tools and materials of a collage artist. I take these and make magical transformations; I create images in which small elements become my pigment. I ply paper as brushstrokes and develop complexity through construction. Tiny bits provide hue and shape, while the embedded words and images saturate the picture with humor, meaning, and irony. My source material is “used and useless” paper – old magazines and catalogs. I extract precise colors, words and images, cut and shape them and glue them to board, building and filling as I go. Although the technique is painterly, I use no paint or other media in the process – only paper. I meditate on the dissolution of matter: things that exist in time and space but are so diffused that they are barely perceptible. Beginnings and endings merge. A series that I have been developing over the past few years is “Elements,” studying the edges of beings in dissolution. I have applied my technique to all matter of subjects – portraits, landscape, still life. One of my favorite subjects is the cosmos – stars, planets, galaxies, nebulae. I am working on a series of large collages that I call “Coral Reef.”