Apart from these and some isolated earlier pieces I have largely used collage to illustrate printed texts. Since the fragments I've favoured have mostly come from books it has been a circular process of returning books to books and of printing the already printed. This could be a fringe example of that aesthetic of 'truth to materials' current in my boyhood. Many of the pictures that accompany Dante's Inferno originated as collages, one of which recycled a Doré illustration of the same text.

The largest group however was done in the eighties to illustrate a proposed edition of H.W.K. Collam's novel Unhaunted Comma and his poetry collection Come Autumn Hand. These employ various bits of magazines current in the author's own youth, such as La Mode Illustrée. In using such engravings as a source I benefit from the dead and their cheap labour (so little regarded in its own day). It could also be that I am honouring their long, lamplit hours by reviving, for a second life, the skilled hatching and cross-hatching that I first came across in the late nineteenth century Boy's Own Annuals, which my brother and I collected (and somewhat guiltily kept back) as wartime paper salvage. These feasts of dramatic engraving on crisp paper are my favourite mine of shape and shading, and their scrambled visual information has provided the surface of a recent globe as well as all the pictures that formed the starting point for The Class of '47.

Also lurking in these splendid volumes (and their sister annuals of the Girl's Own) are occasional fold-out lithographs of serried ranks, or savage beasts, or moral moments from English history. I took advantage of the strange colours and textures unique to their process to accompany Plato's Symposium, a work that defies illustration in the normal sense but is rich in prods to the imagination. Thus, by a short cut, an economically produced book of the present could be illuminated with craftsmanlike lithographic richness. At least that was the idea. Somewhere along the line however my calculations slipped up and no such magic happened.

Click here for images from Symposium, 206 Kb

The employment of particles of the printed world as tesserae in a paper mosaic is perhaps the purest use of collage. Here the fragments, freed from their original context, become a special kind of drawing tool or, in the case of coloured elements, a palette with a range in part beyond the painter's normal resource of mixable colour.  > >

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