The Art of Collage: Interview with Eunice Parsons by Eva Lake, November 2004
You said that you had spent an earlier time in your life being ‘artless.’ And then you had realization that you had to be an artist. What happened?
I had art when I was young, but in 1933 when I got out of high school there was no way to make a living and I didn’t want to be a commercial artist. I didn’t want to be a Sunday painter. I had grown up by the Art Institute and I knew what real art was. If I couldn’t have that, well then by God, I wouldn’t have anything. I just simply closed the door. I thought: I’ll get married, I’ll have a family and be a good mother and I’ll try to not think about art anymore. And that’s like trying to not think of the elephant in the living room.
When I had time to go to art school after starting a family, I did.
You started in painting but are now known as a collage artist. How did that come about?
Painting is seductive. I did printmaking too and it was all wonderful. But then I found paper and one day when I was sitting in my attic tearing paper and pasting, I thought: “This is where I was when I was ten years old.” I had gone full circle, all the way around the mulberry bush. Except, in the meantime, I had learned about composition and the history of art, the things an artist needs to know.
I actually first started making collage to solve design problems in painting -- it isn’t like a drawn line you must erase to change. Then one day I saw that these things could exist on their own, that they would stand on their own. And as with anything, I started with simple figurative designs and eventually I found it was an excellent way to cope with abstract art, which is finally where you want to go. Things exist as themselves.
In art history, who is important to you? Kurt Schwitters?
He’s the idol of anyone who works in collage. Anybody who does collage has to do three low bows to Kurt Schwitters.
Have you been to major shows of his?
Forty years ago the museum had four little postage-stamp sized collages. They were about one by two, really tiny but my God! They had the biggest impact. I’m still carrying them in my head. …Any working artist carries in his head a million images. You can float through them like pages. It’s where you come from to go where you want to go. They’re roadmaps.
You told me how friends say: “She used to be a painter but she just makes collages now.” The interest was a dip as opposed to a soar.
Yes, their voice would dip down. Like it’s a nice pastime, but it isn’t art. It’s hard to convince a certain segment that collage is relevant. Paint is like grand opera, they think oh, it’s an oil painting. So even if it’s crap, it’s an oil painting.
The attitude is that anyone can make a collage. And maybe at some point, they have.
Well, the classical pasting of labels on luggage. Even a person with minimal art education thinks they can make one. They see them and say: “Wow, I’m going to that.” But it isn’t as easy as it looks.
I’ve noticed that many young artists might make collages when they start out, like in a fanzine or a poster for a band. But they often go to other mediums, still making the odd collage but not really showing or acknowledging them.
Well when I do it, I do it with the idea that it is art and it’s salable and that it is meant to be seen. It isn’t private, save for a calendar I make for Christmas every year. But even then, each page has to be a zinger. Collage is the easier thing to do banal – or ordinary. You really have to work at it, to lift it.
You told me that you had enough paper for ten years. Let’s talk a bit about paper.
The attic has what would be two bedrooms but they are really my studio. A student made racks for me and I use stationary boxes to hold paper from various trips to Europe. I ripped off posters. I felt no compunction about as they use such poor glue on them that they are flapping in the wind.
They’re a gift to the public anyway. It’s fair game.
So I have a lot of European posters which are infinitely more interesting than the American poster. They have awfully good designers. And I have letters, I have postcards and people give me stuff.
Are people looking for you?
Yes. I have friends with two daughters, one who had just come back from India and the other from Africa. When they saw what I was doing, they both came through with things for me. And you never know what you’re going to need in the next collage… the stray piece of paper which makes a telling point to which you say yeah, that ties it together.
Your work with posters reminds me of Mimmo Rotella and the Affichists. You’re like them but you’ve taken it a bit further. When you’re in the airport and you’ve got all this paper, how does that go over?
Now I just roll it all up and put an address on the outside and mail it home. Then when you get it home, it’s all layers, so I put the posters in the bathtub and soak them and then take them out, hang them on the line and then when they are dry, I iron them. And it’s like a grab bag. You never know what you’re getting, what will be under the layers.
Then you’re probably never going to an art supply store and buying paper.
No. People give me paper – I don’t have to buy that. But let me tell you the formula for making absolutely excruciatingly lovely paper -- except it takes nine months and when you tell amateurs that, they say: “Nine months? Forget about it.” You take glossy magazines which have good stock and you pick out what you think you want in terms of color, crumple it up and fill a plastic bucket with it. You put it in the backyard and let the wind and rain in, and the bugs and seeds and just leave it all winter. Bring it back in the spring, shake out all the seeds and detritus, iron it and it’s beautiful. Oh! Ah! This piece is too wonderful to use. It reads when it’s pasted down like marble.
Texture is important for you. But so is image?
Image in an abstract way. Mostly it’s abstract – color to color, form to form, line to line.
Are there people who say, while you’re cutting up something: “How can you do that?”
Yes. How can you.do it. Occasionally I look at a piece and think this is too gorgeous, I can’t do it. But I’m going to be gone soon and someone will just throw it away, so I cut.
But maybe for years you did hold on to it.
You go through this purge everyday.
I had a friend with a basement full of old magazines. He slowly gave them to me but also constantly said: “I can’t believe you’re going to cut those up.”
You have to be brave. Faint heart never won a beautiful collage.
How do you organize your boxes of material?
About once a month I try to make order out of chaos. As soon as I start I scramble through boxes and pull stuff out and by the end of the week you can’t see the floor. But you know you saw a certain piece and it must still be there. I do try for categories: categories of subject matter, of color – black, green, blue.
Because sometimes you know you need green somewhere. And then typography – lettering. That’s important to you.
Words, words, words. I live my life by words. I mean, Scrabble is my favorite game. And sometimes you only use part of a word, but it’s still meaningful for you. And old letters, the handwriting. One artist who has since died and used to write me wonderful letters – he had a handwriting which went six different ways since Sunday -- I’ve been trying to incorporate it into a collage with his picture. But it’s hard to make it work. If I start out with a set idea that this, this and this go together, it’s like trying to push something solid through a sieve.
So it’s not always the artist who is making the art. The art sort of makes itself and you’re –
You’re the director, the conduit.
That’s got to be something that you do try to teach students when you were teaching…that’s got to be the most difficult thing too.
I’ve loved teaching. I was so lucky to be able to teach for twenty years at the Museum Art School. I didn’t have a Masters to get my foot in the door. Practically all of my current friends are ex-students. I think that says something for my teaching.
A technical question: what kind of glue do you use?
For years I used a clear latex that housepainters use to mix as a base for color. Just clear latex. But in the last few years I’ve been using Yes, which sounds funny, but Yes in the name of it. But it has the advantage of being not as wet, so what you paste tends not to buckle as much.
OK, archival concerns. That’s a hard thing with collage artists.
I try to be careful. Anybody knows that newspaper will yellow. But. You have to moderate those concerns with what you want to say. Your upper half of your head says be concerned and the lower half says go ahead. When I was out at Marylhurst (Matriarchs of Modernism in 2004), somebody came along and looked at one of my collages that I did in 1973 and tapped the edge, which was cardboard and said: “Doesn’t that upset you?” and I said: “No, this has been around for thirty years and it’s still holding up.”
You take those collages that Picasso and Braque did in about 1909 and I’m sure that when they laid them out, they were crisp, white, black and brown. And now they’re sort of an over-all cream color. And they’re still beautiful pieces of work.
So how do the pieces come out? Fast or slow?
Every so often, god gives you one for free. A piece falls together and you say: “Hey, it’s there.” You don’t dink around. You just paste it. But others may have to wait for a week or more till you resolve it, till you find the one piece that will lift them out of the ordinary. And pasting is a bitch. It’s very hard. I shuffle the stuff around till it’s absolutely perfect. But if you loose one relationship by even half an inch, it can upset the whole balance.
Sometimes I make a map. I put a piece of tracing paper over and make notes or indications. Sometimes I nick the corners. One time I was at the Matisse Museum in Nice and this was when you could still get up close, I saw his snail –
The spiral?
-- And I was able to get close and I saw that in every corner there was this little nick which showed him precisely where to put it. And I thought, well, he did it too.
Also, your work started out maybe less about color. It’s a fabulous change, so tell me about it.
Well, this is strange… when I first started painting, I was looking at a lot of Goya and I painted with a lot of black and ochre. And my youngest daughter, who was about seven, said: “I could tell it was your painting because it had so much mediocre in it.” -- But it’s also just the liberating influence of torn paper. You’re not mixing color – the color is already there.
Eva Lake/ Artstar Radio
November 2004
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