The Master of the Avenue B School of Art
What a thrill it was tonight: Not only to be in a room arrayed with an abundance of amazing collages by one of my idols, John Evans, but to actually meet him! And to tell him that he has been a great influence and inspiration for my own collage practice. He was holding court at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in Chelsea, at a reception celebrating the publication of a book of his works from the year 1984.
For decades, Evans made daily collages in bound books on heavy paper, applying collected gems of ephemera from his East Village neighborhood and life to grounds of watercolor wash, bound by hand-drawn borders—each page date-stamped. Ducks were his Ninas, and they were all lined up at the gallery this evening, as a continuous motif along the bottoms of his works. Intimate in size, each piece is about 8” x 5”; each page has been carefully extracted by X-acto knife and metal ruler from Evans’ notebooks.
People love his work for different reasons: Some are attracted to the dates—Valentine’s day, today, the Ides of March, their birthdays. Others love to interrogate the jewel-like content—stamps, ornate fabric swatches, candy foils, ads, cookie fortunes, found notes, packaging labels. Then there is his signature formalism, the way he incorporates pasted objects with paint, ink,color and wit that magically coalesce into totemic sculpture, akin to the way Leger made 2-D look 3-D.
I also learned John Evans is a father of twins!
A solo show of my collages at Darren Winston Bookseller, Sharon, CT
A bibliopole who runs a mid-century-modern-décor salon adorned with mouthwatering books, ephemera and objets, Darren Winston is also a gallerist who is giving me a solo show. “On the Street Where You Live,” opening on March 20, features 30 or so of my original collages. The works, created in notebooks over the past few years, are based on my peregrinations through various places—Hudson NY, Manhattan neighborhoods, North Adams, Great Barrington, Dutchess County, and somewhere between Portland and Portsmouth. A pickup artist, I am always scouring the ground, looking for choice shards to use, curating them as treasures to eventually paste down in careful compositions.
The collages explore my fascination with post-consumer behavior, puns and colorful lingo in the deluge of marketing messages, and their connections to real locations and times.
Now, I can honestly call myself the Rosen of Sharon.
Directions to Darren Winston Booksellers