THE BEAST COLLAGE
There’s a reason I started creating the collage I now call The Beast, and how it ended up just over twenty feet long. After being a T-shirt artist for most of my adult life, I decided one day in mid-2021 that I had such a large body of work, I might as well turn myself into a pop artist and use all those stored-away images to at least get The Beast started and see where it wound up.
That same day, I happened to stumble onto Sotheby’s auctioning off an NFT collage created by the artist Beeple. I was pretty impressed when I learned he’d created 5,000 images digitally, all crammed into a 70-by-70-inch square, and that it had taken him about 5,000 days, or around 13 years, to make the thing. What I didn’t quite understand was why he would squeeze 5,000 images into such a small canvas. I also couldn’t imagine who would want to buy something you can’t even see or enjoy up close. And that’s when I learned what an NFT was. Needless to say, my mind was blown when it fetched a record 69.3 million dollars. That was my first introduction to the world of NFTs, and none of it made any sense to me, especially the insanely high prices they were selling for. But what the hell did I know? I’m always the guy who finds out about new money-making fads once it’s already too late anyway. So, after a bit of investigating, the NFT world came crashing down, and that was the end of me trying to break into that scene.
My mind kept spinning for a few days, until I finally realized that if this guy can create and sell a collage that size, with that many images, for that much money, then why couldn’t I? I wasn’t thinking about NFTs or million-dollar auctions. I was thinking about making something physically massive, and how fun it would be to really push my creative limits and come up with a boatload of great designs for it. I knew I wouldn’t hit 5,000 images like Beeple, but I didn’t think it would grow as big as it did either. Today, it stands at 244.5 inches wide by 68 inches tall, made up of 405 designs total.
When I started The Beast in mid-2021, we were already a year into the pandemic. I had gotten stuck on Cape Cod on my way to Barcelona, literally the week everything went to hell with COVID going full throttle. Turns out, it was a blessing in disguise. I was able to create not just The Beast, but a bunch of other pop art, day and night, with zero distractions. It may sound cliché, but I really was like a writer in the woods, with nobody around to bother me. I started the collage in the center, with a four-panel Andy Warhol design as my centerpiece, and built it outward, column by column, using a bunch of never-before-used and leftover designs from my T-shirt business, which had been sitting dormant for years. I decided every design would go on a six-inch-wide panel, with varying lengths, and no overlapping.
The weeks, months, and eventually years went by, and The Beast started to take on a life of its own. Every couple of weeks, I’d add a dozen or so new rough layouts, waiting to be turned into final pieces in Photoshop. At one point, I thought maybe The Beast wanted to end up in the Guinness Book of World Records — the biggest and wildest collage ever made. It kept telling me I had more in me, and I might as well get it all out now, because there wasn’t going to be a second one. So I listened, and I let The Beast do its thing. It knew me well. It knew that just about every single day, I’d see something ridiculous, hilarious, or just plain fucked up in the news, and that would light the creative spark. That well of inspiration wasn’t drying up anytime soon.
Eventually, after a couple of years, I had to bring it to an end. I picked a date and wrote it down. That was the day I had to stop my obsessive, compulsive habit. And on that day, I finished it. The Beast didn’t die; it came to life. To me, it became the greatest collage of all time, born out of the circus we call life on this planet.
If I had to categorize the style and influences behind The Beast, I’d say it’s two parts Warhol, three parts Ron English, mixed with two parts Wacky Packages, and one part Georges Seurat, who, like me, also dabbled in pointillism, painting with dots. If you don’t recognize any of those names, do yourself a favor and look them up.
The ultimate goal is to have The Beast hung in a public space. Unlike most art in museums, where people spend five or ten minutes looking at something, The Beast with its 405 designs wants you to stick around a lot longer and actually feel something you won’t get from most other pieces. You might laugh. You might get pissed off. You might agree, then immediately disagree. You might even hate me, call me sexist, a racist, or think I’m a total asshole. It would honestly make me happy if I could stir up any one of those emotions, or all of them, while getting you to hang around and look at The Beast for a good thirty minutes or more. That’s when I’ll know, like Dr. Frankenstein, I brought something to life. A work of art made up of many different parts. My very own giant monster.
