Collage shortcuts

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This time I have three versions of a same collage base. Normally I make many modifications until the final picture looks satisfactory to my eyes. After that, I generally prefer to work on a different subject. I event try to avoid repetition in my collages which is not easy as their number is steadily growing.
It started with the reverted eyes on a face. The rest went quite as usual: I found a “body” and a “theme”: the open book and thought about the ecstasy of studying Holy Scriptures, or a kind of madness if you prefer. In the solitude of the study, we see these eyes wandering between the onlooker and the text. That’s scaring! But still, I wasn’t quite sure about the result and felt that I could do some more work. But my wife told me to leave the collage like that. So I decided to follow her advice. I scanned the collage and tried some other possibilities that are displayed here.

I found an ad about men’s wear and found that it was a good match despite the fact that the hiding theme is recurrent in my work – maybe because of my early childhood in Nazi-Germany. I hesitated: I didn’t want to repeat myself. After a brief thought of a yellow star in the right bottom, I changed my mind for a Shakespearian interpretation: man in a jacket that’s too large for him, trying to hide in it or even to disappear. I added a kind of weird crown to make it more evident and to make the picture more colored. In these days where a dictator is not sure of remaining in place, I felt this collage as being quite adequate.

The third one is the fruit of hazard. I fell upon a picture showing a Muslim woman doing some journalistic work at the risk of her life. I tore it up and it matched beautifully in spite of the many snags in the picture. These breaks may be seen as signs of frailty. So this third version is about writing, telling and the danger these people are menaced with when the established power lets the mob loose, like in Egypt.

I also remembered a Carolingian miniature showing an inspired Evangelist trembling or shaken by what he is writing down, a picture I have been loving since ever (Gospel of Ebbo).