ten modern classics

I have rediscovered my old love of making collages. There is something wonderful about returning to the basics of image making. Line and colour. And a strange thing happens in the process. Writers will tell you that the story takes over, that characters develop in ways the author had not anticipated. A similar thing happens when I pick up my bits of papers of different shapes and colours. It is as if they demand to be assmebled in a certain way and making a collage becomes the search for this unknown harmony. It may all look hap hazard to you, but I can spend hours in a strange almost meditative state moving shapes around, chasing that exquisite moment when it all falls into place, when I quietly whisper to myself, yes, that is it, that is how it fits. If I were an athlete, this would be the moment when I start punching the air in a triumph. But I am not, and although the sense of triumph is just as intense in feeling, is much quieter in expression.

This one is called Ten Modern Classics. If you turn your head ninety degrees and look down the right hand side you will see why. It is the title of an old Pelican paperback. I love those old paperbacks. I love their design and the ethos behind them. Allen Lane wanted to make good writing available to a wide readership and understood so well how the visual arts would carry the written word. Orange is still associated with Penguins, long before airlines and telecommunications companies tried to make it theirs. Pelicans are a wonderful blue, subtler than turquise, a sort of sun bleached indigo, which, when the paper it was printed on, has turned yellow with age, becomes even more complex and delicate.

I also like the title. Ten Modern Classics. There is something contradictory about it. All things modern belong to the present and the future. Classics belong to the past. This contradiction remains only as long as we see time as somehow moving forward. When the latest thing is modern. We have long since abandoned the modernist faith in progress and the modernist battle cry, Make All Things New! has perhaps, like the Pelican Blue, become more subtle, more complex with age. Rather than an all out rejection of all at went before, we have come to realise that basic elements are immutable classics and their newness, their modernity comes from new constellations, from seeing things anew. That is what I try to do in a very simple way with my collage work. I pick up old bits and pieces, sometimes from old second hand bookshops, sometimes discarded wrapping paper, or the label on an old tin. Sometimes the debris on my studio floor. Pieces of old drawings and cutouts. I have become a magpie of colours. Even if I cannot follow the modernist dictum and make all things new, I can at least make old things new.