Pulp and Circumstance

Pulp and Circumstance is a series of digital collages made from pulp magazine sources - Mostly cover art from sci-fi and detective mags from the 1930s - '50s. These digital collages have served as the basis for several oil paintings:

Director of Hallucinations

Winner's Circle

Succubus

Levitation (not online yet . . .)

Since my childhood, I have loved pulp illustration. Early sci fi illustration on the covers of Amazing Stories fascinated me - and they still do today, a life long enthusiasm.

As a teenager, I came up with the term "seamless collage" to describe collages I was making that used illustration styles so similar that when collaged together they appear to be a homogenous illustration. I found that when I collaged together elementary school text books from the 1950s that (with the help of handpainted corrections) the resulting collages were "seamless".

During the winter of 2018 I revisited this idea using digital collage as the medium. For me, it is more effective to make collages digitally and the vintage source materials are spared the scissors. It was during a period of personal malaise in which I could not function otherwise but to make these collages. I had difficulty mustering the resolve to get out of bed, and because I could make these collages on a laptop - I hardly got out of bed for a period of weeks. However, this doesn't have that much to do with the collages themselves, but has more to do with my own idiosyncracies - of which I will write more about later.

Now when I look back at this series, I am a bit embarrassed by the attitude towards the source material: I somehow ignored that in many instances I was collaging together famous images by well-known illustrators of the pulp period and genre. In the best examples from Pulp and Circumstance, such as "Family Planning", a genuinely new work is arrived at. In the worst, such as "Time and Silence", I have really done little more than embellished a famous sci-fi cover with an image from another well-known cover.

In the past few years I have begun collecting pulp magazines and have learned much more about the magazines, the illustrators and the writers. Today, I don't think I would approach collage work with pulp magazines in the same way as I did 8 years ago.