Under Western Skies

For an upcoming show at the PFAA, entitled Under Western Skies, I collaged this landscape. It is the combination of 2 wood cuts, Long's Peak, and Chicago Lake, both from Picturesque America.

Originally, I envisioned a vertical. Although landscapes are traditionally made in landscape format, I have found that the vertical format gives this sort of collage a liveliness and sustains the abstract quality created by distancing the individual sections more. However, these images combine nicely in the horizontal format. The window pane effect, sash and muntins, serves two purposes. It creates the effect of looking through a window, which is increased by mitering the individual section; and it introduces a gap between the disparate pieces allowing the eye to "see" a continuity that isn't there.

The collaging of separate images has been around a long time. Aside from what we popularly think of as collage: Chuck Close uses the idea to create a large image that comes into focus with distance from the image. David Hockney often breaks up a scene with separate photographs or panels that provide the subject information. Others make large panels of small images to create a flat field effect. Most of my collage work is intended to create homogenous images that almost could be real but are not. This style plays with the human capacity to find patterns—finding linkages—where they might not exist. We see a panoramic scenic: the sky and mountains, and the foreground rocks, extend left to right in almost continuous lines. The middle ground too, could almost be.

Never surreal in the accepted sense, my collages are fantastical realism.

Untitled at the moment, this image is 31.500 by 16.125 inches, printed using Epson's UltraGiclée system (7600 with Ultrachrome ink and Epson's archival paper). © 2009 Walton Mendelson