A number of years ago, almost 20 now, I worked downtown in one of the few corporate obelisks here in Ft. Worth. The top floors were occupied by the property owners. They were people of immense wealth and good taste. The walls were dotted with art, usually tending toward the contemporary side. Some of it slipped into the modern category: wild sculptures and paintings of either unbridled splashery or very neatly done geometric shapes. At this point, art stops speaking to me. "The Emperor has no clothes!", I want to shout.
There was one piece, however, that cast a spell on me. I never knew (until now) the name of the artist or the title of the piece. It was a photographic collage, very large (109" x 58" I now find). I find the terms collage, montage and mosaic difficult to differentiate as they relate to photography. Whichever term applies, allow me to describe it...
Imagine a hundred or so prints, apparently borderless 8 x 10s. These images are arranged so as to overlap with their overall shape approximating an ovalish sort of shape. The composite image is of the footpath across the Brooklyn Bridge. At the bottom of the collage, you see the photographers feet. At the top of the image is the superstructure of the bridge. It widens in the middle, incorporating more prints, filling out the image of the footpath and the bridge.
I went for this near-20 years not knowing who did this or what it was called, but I remembered it and was inspired
by it in some of my own creations. In wanting to write about it here, it tried again and again, with limited success, to divine this information using the magic of Google. Finally, I found an artist in New York, David McGlynn, who had created similar photo collages. It looked like it could be his work, so I e-mailed him, asking if it was his or if he knew whose it was.
While waiting to hear back from Mr. McGlynn, I discovered what I had been searching for: an image of a photo collage called "Brooklyn Bridge" created by an English artist named David Hockney in 1982. Not long after I had made this discovery, I received a very gracious response from David McGlynn, a very successful artist in his own right. Having only given him a coarse description of what I recalled, he said this:
It could have been mine... or David Hockney's(!)
I created this piece in 1982 [his "Brooklyn Bridge"].
It has been exhibited here & there, and is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. At around the same time, the painter David Hockney began experimenting with Polaroid & snapshot collages. And though there could have been no connection between us, he happened to do a collage from the same perspective, virtually from the same spot on the bridge:
You probably saw Hockney's 1982 image, with the feet on the bottom. Interestingly I had been doing collages like this since 1979, and have included my feet in the bottom of some of them(!) Here is one from 1981: [the boat]
One day, the art historians will sort it all out!
Cheers,
David McGlynn
Mr. McGlynn was right. It was the Hockney that I remembered. This collage had a limited production of 20 copies. Who knows which of those I saw.
If you get a chance and want to see some more of Mr. McGlynn's work, go to his website. I recommend it; some pretty cool stuff.
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