 
Art + Culture
Winter/Spring 2006
WORTH 1,000 WORDS
Textual collages from the pages of Architectural Digest
give crisp, new dimension to the everyday experience
Story by Janice Kleinschmidt
Photography by Jay Jorgensen
Painters have their color palette, and Richard Curtner has manila folders in a portable, plastic file box. The Cathedral City artist has found his niche in textual collage- portraits and landscapes created from magazine clippings.Instead of paint tubes, Curtner scours file folders labeled “Blue,” “Red,” “Gold,” etc. His challenge is not mixing colors to get the right shade, but to find the right shade—as well as the right words to match his theme. “I try to take everyday moments or everyday objects and with the word collage add another dimension to them,” he says. As a child, Curtner enjoyed drawing with pencil and later turned to paint. Even an early painting of musical instruments free- floating on an orange-cream field resembles a collage. “I like structure, I like detail. But I like randomness too,” he explains. His favorite artists are Escher, Modigliani, Magritte, and Matisse. “I like their theme and use of detail,” he says.
He made his first textual collage in the mid-1990s in the Dominican Republic, which he was visiting when he met his future wife, Sardis, and decided to stay. He studied drawing and painting under Guillo Perez, who is known internationally for his landscapes.
Curtner’s earlier textual collages are easy to pick out because the words came from Spanish-language magazines. Today he relies entirely on Architectural Digest for his material because a printing expert told him that magazine used the best paper.
“I have Architectural Digest magazines from the 70’s,” Curtner says, “and the paper is still white.” In fact, he has a garage full of magazines, many purchased from libraries or secondhand shops.
Curtner begins with a theme, sketching and then laying out the design that will be placed on the canvas before turning to his palette file. “While I am getting the colors, I am looking for words that will match the theme of the piece,” he says. When he finds them, he cuts the size and shape with an X-Acto knife.
His image of an old-fashioned, black dial phone exhibits not only his steady hand cutting small pieces of paper but also his skill at shading, because the piece includes only black, white, and gray. “Shading is key,” he says. Even his signature is cut from magazine pages.
However, Curtner omits a few details: facial features. “Some of the idea is that in the Dominican Republic they have dolls they sell and none of the dolls have faces because [the native residents] don’t know their true origins or their nationality,” he explains. He further likes the way a blank face allows greater interpretation by the viewer.
Even without eyes and mouths, Curtner’s subjects relay mood and emotion through body language, as well as the literal language. Chaotic Embrace also conveys motion, as though the woman in the picture has just leapt into the arms of her lover and wrapped her legs around him. Self-reflection, a portrait of a woman looking at her image in the bathroom mirror, “is all about what a person thinks about themselves,” says Curtner, who broke his own unwritten rule by using a tile pattern for the bathroom walls instead of words. “I am not going to continue doing that. I just liked it for the feel [of this collage],” he says. Vertigo, in which a woman views a painting of herself in a museum, is based on a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie of the same name (and one of Curtner’s favorite films). “I saw an article about Hitchcock, and I thought it would be nice to do one of that scene.” The 28x18 inch collage, which of course includes the clipped article, took Curtner between 30 and 40 hours to create. Smaller works take 20 to 25 hours.
Textual collages not only can take a long time to make but also to view. At art festivals, where Curtner exhibits and sells his pieces, people often stand for some time reading them. “I try to see how much they are getting out of it,” he says, “and they are pointing out stuff to me that I have even forgotten I put in there.”
Richard Curtner exhibits at the La Quinta, Southwest, and Indian Wells arts festivals. His website is www.curtnerart.com. |
