14 Comments
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Kevin Davis's avatar

Yes yes yes often clicking to see what you're up to! How do you know when a collage is done? Do you have a certain feeling or any guiding principal or is it different and organic each time?

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Duane Toops's avatar

Great question Kevin! Someone else asked me that recently, and I was a bit taken aback by the complexity of answering it. In the best of circumstances, it's a feeling. An all-encompassing surety. The Hebrew word Shalom often gets translated as peace, but a more literal translation might be closer to 'completion', or wholeness, the sense that nothing is missing and nothing is broken. On really good days, it's like that.

But...on most other days, it's more of a process of elimination in a way. It's when I realize that everything I've added or am trying to add to a piece is detracting from the 'wholeness'. Then it becomes a matter taking things away until it feels right, or balanced, or until it becomes clear that there's no where else to take it and nothing else I can do.

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Kevin Davis's avatar

Damn that was a good answer! May I live my life as such!!!! haha

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Duane Toops's avatar

I'm trying too!! 🤣

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Elizabeth Grace Martinez's avatar

Monuments to us

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Duane Toops's avatar

Exactly! Thanks so much!

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Jenn's avatar

“Where chaos meets clean lines and geometry meets jagged edges, is the residue. The remnants. The ruins.”

This is it 🙌

Also I love a practiced method of being and dizzy with the fact…. The way that pale text protrudes into the red has me swooning.

Beautiful as always !

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Duane Toops's avatar

Thanks Jenn! It’s so funny, I had that square of red with the pale text before I had anything else for this piece, it’s almost like I made the entire collage for the sake of that section, lol!

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Jenn's avatar

That’s too funny; it was demanding an audience, I think.

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Duane Toops's avatar

apparently so! a needy little fragment!

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Brian Funke's avatar

Loving a practiced method of being👏

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Duane Toops's avatar

Thanks Brian! I appreciate you! I working on a lot of grid-like structures these days. Hoping to start scaling them up in the near future.

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Ann Collins's avatar

Your best yet.

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Duane Toops's avatar

Wow! Thank you Ann! I appreciate it!

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