THE BEAST COLLAGE
There is a reason why I started creating my collage I now call “The Beast,” and how it grew to just over twenty feet long. After being a t-shirt artist most of my adult life, I decided one day, in mid-2021, that I had such a large body of work, why not turn myself into a pop artist and use my many stored-away images to at least get “The Beast” started and see where it wound up.
That day, I had stumbled onto Sotheby’s auctioning off an NFT collage created by the artist Beeple. I was quite impressed when I learned he’d created 5,000 images digitally, inside of only a 70” by 70” square, and how long it had taken him to create the thing. I’m pretty sure it was 5,000 days. What I didn’t quite understand was why he would squeeze the 5,000 images into such a small canvas of space. I also could not imagine who would want to purchase such a thing, if you can’t see and enjoy up close any of the renderings? And that is when I learned what an NFT was. Needless to say, my mind was blown when it fetched a record 69.3 million dollars. This was my first introduction to the word of NFTs, and none of it made any sense to me, especially for the insanely high prices they were selling for. Well, what the hell did I know? I’m always the guy who learns about new money-making fads once it’s too late, anyway! And so, once I started to investigate the NFT world, it came crashing down hard, and that was the end of my trying to get into the NFT world of art.
My mind was racing for a few days when I finally realized, if this guy can create and sell a collage of this size, with so many images for so much money, then I can too. However, I was not at all thinking in terms of an NFT nor the dollar amount Sotheby’s sold it for—I was only thinking in terms of making a collage big in size, and how fun it would be to try and push the envelope of my creativity, to be able to come up with a boatload of great designs for it. I knew my number wasn’t going to be 5,000 like Beeple’s piece, but I also didn’t think it would grow to the final size it is today, 244.5 inches wide by 68 inches tall, with a total of 405 designs making up the entire collage.
When I first started creating “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 the shit hit the fan with Covid going full throttle. Little did I realize at the time, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I was able to create not just the collage, but many other works of art, 24/7, with very little distraction. It may sound cliché, but I was the writer in the woods with nobody to bother me. The collage itself started in the center and worked its way outward, column by column, using a slew of never-before-used and leftover designs from my t-shirt business, which had been lying dormant for many years. I decided each design should be on a 6-inch-wide panel at varied lengths with no overlapping of any kind.
The weeks, months, and years went by as “The Beast” seemed to have taken on a life of its own. It kept growing every couple of weeks, with a dozen or so designs in rough layout form waiting to be made into a final art piece in Photoshop. I first thought maybe “The Beast” wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records, to be known as the biggest and most amusing collage on the planet. It was telling me I had a lot more in me and that I might as well get it all in now, cause there ain’t gonna be a second collage. So, I listened to “The Beast” and went with whatever it wanted me to do. It knew me well. It knew how, just about every single day, there was always something that I would find amusing, over-the-top funny, or just plain fucked up in the news that would trigger my best ideas. That well was not drying up anytime soon observing what is the three-ring circus of life on Planet Earth. It wasn’t until after a couple of years that I finally had to put a stop to it all, writing a date on paper to stop my obsessive and compulsive behavior. And on that date I was finished with it, “The Beast” did not die, but instead came to life, to be what I consider to be the greatest collage in our three-ring circus of life.
If one were to categorize all of the designs in “The Beast” in a particular style and influence, it would be two parts Warhol, three parts Ron English, mixed in with two parts Wacky Packages, and one part Georges Seurat, as I, too, have dabbled in drawing with dots (or pointillism). For those of you who don’t recognize any of these names, I encourage you to look them all up.
The main goal here is to have “The Beast” hung in a public place. Unlike most pieces in a museum, where the public spends maybe 5 or 10 minutes observing any piece of art, “The Beast,” with its 405 designs, wants you to stay longer and to trigger your emotions. You may laugh, you may get angry, you may agree, then disagree. You may hate me and think I’m sexist and an asshole. If some or all of these emotions happen and you stick around for a good 30 minutes or more, then I’ve done my job.
