Have you ever been stymied by a conversation that just isn’t connecting? It happens to me more than I’d like. I often find myself perplexed, sometimes after the fact: how did I not manage to communicate and find agreement?

Sometimes, I see shades of gray; the other side is more of a black & white person. Sometimes, it’s the other way round. Each of us has a valid point, and is doing our best, but connections are not leaping across that great divide.

While this was happening in my life, I was exploring a very simple compositional structure in my art: halves. Not thirds, or grids, or stripes: what if I just — divided the page in half? Right about the same time, a particularly intriguing call appeared from the Special Agent Collage Collective: Confrontage. I welcomed the chance to explore how composition could be at odds, but still somewhat resolved, and I appreciated that the collective was trying to expand the definition of this subtype of collage work.

I ended up submitting three analog versions of these halved compositions to the call, and the three matching digital versions were sent off to another collage show in Vancouver, as I wrote here: World Collage Day Events, and as shown below (analog in the first row, related digital pieces second).

Well, now things were real! Pieces that might not have been quite done were being shown: time to keep the process going. I worked on multiple revisions of the digital pieces, and finally, I had what looked like some cohesion as a whole. Not like my real-life conversations at all, but with each side balanced on its own, with some references crossing over into the other half, or not at all.

The project is documented as Conversations, and offers some bright, graphic compositions, at odds with the other half of the page. I envision these pieces as simple postcards; using one to reach out to someone and express your appreciation of them, despite possible differences in the past. While I’m hunting down printing options, let me know if you have other thoughts.