Let's Bury Tomorrow

Two Men With A Secret

The illustrations for this collage were found in an old Reader's Digest Condensed book. These old and often dusty, worthless looking books you find for a dime a dozen at thrift stores contain some incredibly interesting and underappreciated illustrations from little known artists. For those who are fans of old illustrations, these sad looking books are worth checking out.

Homo Marxian

It's rather rare to find any interesting books about communism in thrift stores and if one is found, it will usually be filled with hilarious and scary anecdotes about communists and in the same breath you will be pressured to convert to Christianity if you already haven't, just because you wanted to read a book about communism.
A couple of books I've found over the years stand out, not only because it's unusual at least around these parts to find any books on communism that aren't thinly veiled religious tomes but also because these two particular books have excellent illustrations. The books whose illustrations of communism should be noted are The Naked Communist and Communism, An American's View. Granted, The Naked Communist has a religious slant to it and the preaching begins towards the end when you've been about scared out of your wits by the communist boogieman but never mind the text, it's the illustrations we're after!
Each book was filled with some great pieces, and the second book mentioned, Communism, An American's View, is full of woodcuts of Stalin, Marx, Lenin, and other creatures often found in texts of this sort, the artwork being completed by Leonard Everett Fisher, who also designed several postage stamps.
The pieces in the collage were culled from these two books.

Voyeur

Megasoundscape

Recently I found a box of Ilford photography paper at a local thrift store. Surely the paper wouldn't be good for developing photos but I knew I could use it in my collages. One night I decided to use a piece of photo paper and run it through my printer, printing out a copy of a piece of vintage illustration of a sound wave I'd scanned. It worked pretty well and I set the paper under my lamp to dry. After a few days I noticed that the paper had turned a nice brown hue. Here's the result.

Birds in Nocturnus

Some pieces I recently cut out

GESTURE

The flower used here is cut from a garden book that is around 90 years old. 

Vacuum Tube Robot

A nice piece of foxed endpaper and some vintage electronics images from the 1955 electronic educational book Basic Electronics by Van Valkenburgh helped create this blue faced robot. 

Basic Electronics is filled with hundreds of images of vacuum tubes, capacitors, and funny pictures of electronic technicians. If you ever see a copy of this book at a thrift store, grab it. It's one of the best books I've seen for electronic graphics.

Check out my Vintage Science Set over at Flickr for images from this book.

Strawberries for Astra

SOLD

 

At first, this piece was going to be created for a mail art project but magically morphed itself into a small collage. I fell in love with the beautifully foxed endpaper and felt it would do better as a collage.

Creatures of Theda Bara

Infoculture: Mad

Created to just have some fun and send out my good friend Stu some collaged handmade postcards. The doll on the front of the card is an Edison Talking Doll invented by Thomas Edison in 1890. Unfortunately these dolls turned out not to be so desirable by the little Victorian ones and soon the Edison Talking Doll was no more.

Jesus Mows Stonehenge

Through the Looking Glass

Duty Now For the Future

Alfred Hitchcock's alter ego

Mad Scientist

3D collage with cut out images of scientific images from vintage paper.

SOLD

IN A DREAM

It's What We Dream

It's not often that I do collages that aren't in 3D but I do enjoy creating them as much as other styles of collage. In a thrift store I came across a baby book with wonderful and expressive faces and cut out all of them to use in future collages. Only 2 pieces of vintage paper were used here: the fish and the little man riding on top of the fish.

The collage depicts the strangeness and surreal images we often experience in our dreams. Often in my dreams I journey to faraway lands and have vivid experiences in bright colors. For me, each dream is a journey into a new experience and also insight into my subconscious self.

The Forgotten Ghostess of Science

I'm not sure I will keep the title of this 3d collage created just last week. Just can't seem to find a title I'm truly satisfied with.
In any case, I am fascinated with old instruments and technology and love to incorporate it into collages when I can. In this particular piece, I wanted to depict a ghostly woman rising from old technology in a perhaps not so subtle hint that women have often been ignored about their contributions to the industrial revolution and technological advances in particular. However it is natural that those who view this piece will have their own interpretations of what it means to them and that I find fascinating in itself.
The instrument on the right is a vintage meteorological mechanism.
Most of the paper used in this collage was not vintage in origin, sans the ribcage used as a transparent skirt.

This latest piece remains untitled. The papers used are a mix of vintage and contemporary papers. My intent here was to show the rich in color and the poor in black and white to depict that the poor remain invisible and the more affluent retain a lot of attention in all aspects of life.

Stampadusa

This was a quick piece I put together after scanning a beautiful image from a book called Hood's Own: Or, Laughter From Year to Year. Being a Further Collection of His Wit and Humour, printed in 1862. I was lucky enough to come across the book while perusing the stacks at the local university library. Go out and search your university library for an original copy of this. It is full of beautiful and often hilarious illustrations.
Here's the original scan

The stamps were from a collection I've had since I was a child. The collage was created for an article I wrote.

And the original book cover of Hood's Own

Optokinetic

One evening I decided to look through some old medical books I had - mostly from the late 40's to early 50's. I was looking for some very morbid photos to depict the suffering of humans. As you can see I ended up layering some of the photos and also altered some of the eyes to create a disturbing set of images. The man in the lower right hand corner was infected with syphilis.