The Collage Journal: Peter Jacobs

"The timelessness of art is when it transcends prior meanings and perceptions and be fresh the next day"

On March 31st 2005, I created a 9 by 12 inch collage using that day's local newspaper,

and have continued that process without interruption every day since.

Visit each of the complete first Seven Years

The Collage Journal is now in its eigth year. I produce a collage solely from the images and texts of that day’s newspaper. The Collage Journal's 2555+ collages reside in over 212 Strathmore books. I have thus-far used 52 cutting boards, 298 Exacto blades, and 262 glues-sticks. As consistent as the newspaper is printed, each day I sit down and construct/reconstruct my visual response and internal feelings in that morning’s collage. Like a written journal, a visual journal incorporates both personal and external experience. The Collage Journal extends the external experience to the world, having the palette of the newspaper’s dissection of stories and images. The newspapers also bring the world of advertising, which is somewhat surreal in their placement to their neighboring articles. I believe this juxtaposition creates a de-sensitizing and detachment in the reader/viewer to the gravity of the news. The Collage Journal has become integrated in my daily life as a meditation, contemplation and re-evaluation of culture and identity.

Details & Components Interactive

Peter Jacobs, who has been involved with the art of collage for over two decades has developed a complex visual language that seeks to reconcile the rational with the irrational. Jacobs' collages are usually comprised of spliced images applied to an architectonic framework. The stability of the architectural foundation allows him to juxtapose incongruous elements that, in spite of themselves, produce a singular cohesive vision. Instinctively the artist seems to assert the primacy of visual relationships over knowledge: in his world it is color, line and space, not reason, that are determinants of logic. The art of collage, as a reconfiguration of discarded images, is a medium destined to render order out of chaos. Jacobs has understood this inherent dilemna and resolves it in a manner that is decidedly postmodern. Passages of humor and wit, beauty and nature, psychology and rhetoric, coexist as a fragmented though unified whole. Indeed, Jacobs continues to reconsider the formal aspects of collage while adhering to the basic principles of its Cubist origins,as an ironic form of expression.

Marina Delaney
Chair: Visual Arts Dept., Dowling College

You have never failed to amaze me with how the material is rearranged, if that is a proper word to use in the collage making process, to express a vision. They always evoke in me some sort of a response. I don't know if it is something that you have intended, or if it is just the external wrapping of a vision personal to only you. Your cleverness of mind gives me a glimmer of hope for the human condition.

Richard DiGangi

There is an inescapable momentum to this artist’s project, and part of the excitement of his work is the anticipation of what will come next; in the news, in the art, and on the imaginative plain where the two intersect.........

Eve Schaenen Writer for The New York Times

Upcoming Exhibition

Featured Artist in the Winter 2011 Strathmore Artist Newsletter

__________________________________________________________________________

Exposition France

__________________________________________________________________________

Work on View at The Montclair Art Museum: Opening Thursday, September 23, 2010

•

__________________________________________________________________________

* Read the New Jersey Monthly article (April 2010) about artist

* Read The Montclair Times article (April 2010) about artist

STILL MOVING

Resume