Collage shortcuts

Sometimes there is no inspiration, the well is dry. As I am familiar with that,I’ll share my thoughts on it.
When I was young, I went through “phases” of intense creativity, painting every day and, some months after, felt completely burnt out. I then figured out that inspiration had left me for ever and I stood before nothing. I would go through something like a brief depression that lasted about the same time as my creativity phase. I usually turned to photography as some sort of replacement. And then, miraculously, the inspiration was back etc. More than I wished, the emptiness between creative periods lasted longer than it should. I ruminated about my lack of artistic power, the end of my artistic career etc. In brief, it was horrible. Every three years, after a long time of nothing, I radically changed my way of painting, because I was empty: when I started painting, I would feel like a beginner. I lived with these cycles till the 90ies. I then worked with industrial lacquer, letting it mix and flow with stunning outcomes. After a couple of years of this experimentation, I felt like repeating myself and I started gluing magazines photos in these abstract paintings, transforming them into “gardens” or “landscapes”. What struck me, was that the neighborhood of a photo transformed the abstract field into a something meaningful, realistic, in phase with the photo. The “emptiness” of the spot turned full. But again, I felt like being caught in a repetitive pattern. Apart from this gestural intermezzo, almost all my paintings were based on collages, but I considered the latter only as a way of finding new subjects for my paintings, destroying them when the painting was done. From 1999, after a discussion with a former student who told me that I was more present in my collages, I concentrated on collage as my principal means of expression, the paintings being a simple blow-up or a support for collage. Since then I have never experienced again the post-intense-creativity-depression or emptiness. The only thing that happens is dragging my feet when the weather is fine, when the sun smiles at me - I don’t feel then as to lock myself up in the studio.

With collage, inspiration comes quickly, day after day, I feel free. But when I have the impression that I am messing around, that nothing interesting will come out from my work, the fear of emptiness creeps again in my heart. Not for a long time, but still…