Do you ever play a speculative game while sitting in a restaurant or watching a passing car? I do, I bet you do too.  A stranger catches my attention, it’s their expression, or dress, or attitude and I ask “What’s the story?” then imagine the relationships, trials, angst, joys of the people I’m observing.  These pieces are like that.  I find photographs of people once known, memories lost, places forgotten, and I imagine the story. I bring together old photos, pages of books, stamps, sheet music, a poem all as pieces of the puzzle, all part of the story.  I don’t want to write the whole visual story I want the viewer to play the game too, I want you to ask “what’s the story?” and finish the piece.

The art is constructed in several stages.  I collect the collage elements together with my “story” in mind.  They are incorporated into a monotype. A monotype consists of inking a smooth Plexiglas plate with ink then removing the ink and creating texture, light and dark.  The collage elements are place face down on the plate a piece of paper placed on top and the whole thing is run through an etching press.  Later I mount the print onto a wood backing, and put a layer of encaustic medium (a mixture of bees wax and demar resin) over the top.  With hot metal objects I incise the surface to add texture and rub pigment into the scar to add another layer in the piece.  Many also have a xerox transfer of a poem or a song or a phrase as the final layer.  The transfer is achieved by burnishing a reverse text copy onto the surface of the wax and carefully removing the paper.