Book of Matan & Other Collages

A ‘grab bag’ of a collages, starting with the first collage I have, from 1962 Mountain Scene. It perfectly embodies my understanding of collage before I encountered the collage works of Max Ernst. This is made up from lots of bits of images I took from magazines, tearing them up and reassembling them to look like other objects, in this case, a mountain terrain.

The cat collages were originally inspired as part of a book project my fiend the poet George MacBeth was doing.

The Book of Matan was a book of automatic writings that told a tale of awakening. The manuscript was left to Nik Douglas to publish. I found it profoundly moving and was inspired to do this set of collages to illustrate the book, (published 1979).

The next collages are some from the Mountain Ecstasy (1978) series that were not in the book.

The Path of the Mystic Lover—Baul Songs of Passion and Ecstasy (1993) was originally the be entitled

To Catch the Uncatable. It was to comprise illustrations in full color, for which I decided to make a series of collages, a few of which are shown here.

Visions of Ecstasy is a collage I created for the exhibition poster for my Show at Visionary Gallery, New York in 1982, featuring my Bird House in the center.