In these works the focus is on faces that are reminiscent of the “impossibilities” in Magritte’s images. What is at issue here, as often in Magritte’s Surrealism, is optical illusion. However, my optical illusions have psychological content. The collaged components of the faces are appropriated from different source paintings and are sufficiently discordant to stand together expressively for tenuously integrated fragments of personality, incoherences of mood, or otherwise precariously organized aspects of the inner and outer self. In this way I have created a new possibility for the relationship between materials and meaning in collage.

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The spatial positions of the collaged pieces shift, like optical illusions, in relation to the perceptual organization found for them by the viewer. Next to and behind mask-like halves of faces lurk inner selves that seem to move forward as the eye of the spectator integrates the two sides into a synthesized face. These “inner self” components then retreat spatially as the face begins once again to break apart. Often slight scale discrepancies between the two sides contribute to these illusions, the larger half advancing (as the mask, or aspect of the self most usually presented to the world) and the smaller half receding (as the withheld, or less-often-appearing aspect of the self).

One is reminded of the psychoanalytic observations that understand personality as an accretion of more or less imperfect incorporations of other selves. And here is the perfect match between my process and the content of my work: the assembling of the collages recapitulates the accretion of components in personality just as the completed images resemble cobbled together selves!!

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Technically and procedurally, much of the actual painting I accomplish in these works takes place along the seams between collaged pieces. It is necessary to make the disparate facial components appear to belong coherently to an integrated image, just as everyone endeavors to present themselves to the world of others as someone whose self makes sense. But I do not try to make the seams disappear altogether, for this would minimize or even obliterate the psychical intensity of the works by excessive blending.

The characters and personalities are neither just realistic descriptions of the actual appearance of faces nor just ideographic hypotheses about the nature of personality. They are both simultaneously, in order to compel in two ways: by the credibility of their naturalistic resemblance and by their plausibility as ideas describing the chaos within innumerable personalities in the world.

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Historically, much of even the best collage has failed to create more than easy-to-achieve disjunctions and incongruities. But I believe that my work has moved beyond this limit to new visual articulations of the complexity and fragmentation of the self.