Collage shortcuts

This collage escaped from destruction. The first idea is the cry with the projection of the hand:

The bottom of the picture doesn't satisfy me. I cut everything out, take the projecting hand away and look for a different context. I soon find it and stick the remaining mouth with some remainings of the baby face on the ad.

The slap appeares! The rest is only a matter of minor adjustments. I mean that the basic expression has been fixed by now. The change concerns the hair, I make it brighter in contrast to the men's.

The final picture is quite the same, just à little trimming of the upper boarder, some minor ajustments with PS and here it is:

As usual, the picture has changed a lot, it is like feeling some's way along in the darkness and finally getting to the light. Seen as it is displayed here, you can find that this is of little interest to because there is no visible connection between the beginnings and the outcome. Yes and no. The cry was an appeal to the onlooker, the picture addresses him with his pain, whereas now its passive and suffering, only the gesture has become less evident: a slap or a caress? Agression or consolation.
But that's up to you to decide, dear visitor.

These days I am making "narrative" collages. I understand by this word a collage that it is more on the illustrative side than on the formal, edgy one.
The question is: Am I a traitor to myself? Am I going back to simple illustration or surrealism?
Well, I hope not. It means to me that I am not the prisoner of any manner. Art, as I see it, is playing with forms and contents. The difficulty lies in the danger of repetition of artistic formulae or patterns. So I must experiment something different as often as I can and collage is very helpful to achieve that. So I am surprised to see what’s coming out and quite delighted. And looking closer at my latest collages, I see the shift in realism that I adore: exaggeration or highlighting, changes in scale etc.
So these collages are just coming to/from me and go their own ways. Am I free?
Well...

I was working on this collage today and from the start found it interesting to comment on it, so I took several pictures.

It started with a fragment lying ramdomly on the cover of a magazine yesterday night. I liked the geometrical shape of it.

This morning, I glued it on the cover and looked for some other pieces to fit. I took the skull that had been on my desk for several days. There I had a figure.

This made an urge for some legs. Easily found.

But now the figure and the background didn't match. I cut out the figure, glued it on a new background, took off the skull and tried a Caravagesque composition.

I intensified the gesture of holding the dead man, in order to express concern.

I might have stopped here. But the picture looked too "baroque" or "ancient" in my eyes, It missed some wit. This lead to the final picture.

Finally, death reappeared in the picture, holding its prey and greeting the audience. I acknowledge again the way collage works and how my hidden artists has its own ways, driving me by the means of insatisfaction. I started with an abstract pattern, just so and ended up with THE question - I had no intention to deal with this subject, nor am I oppressed, depressed, sick or so. But all these dead people in North Africa, in Japan get inside me by some invisible means.

Something very rewarding: the reception of my works by people I don’t know. My exhibition in Geneva was the occasion to meet friends and relatives. It lasted one week only because I had to check in at the hospital. I got many compliments, but nobody bought a print despite the relatively low prices. This stopped the idea of organizing the show myself and the illusion of selling my works directly.
These 2 months, the same works are displayed in a bank in Lyon , and the people there were quite interested by them, asking me questions or making remarks on them while I was putting them on the walls. The boss even allowed me to hang up the collage named shark behind his desk, smiling at the idea that the customer would look at it whilst talking to him. I don’t know if there will be any purchase from the clients or the staff, but I enjoyed the friendly atmosphere, feeling welcomed.

This is quite funny, as two of my early works after collages (in the 60ies) were bank hold-ups, taken by video surveillance mixed with other elements.
So I may have made some progress in my way of looking at banks and in making collages for sure too.

Added on april 4: Now this has been a moment of mental confusion. Sorry folks. Reality is tough and some ideas like the above statement are just dreams.