The History of The Cascading Collage

 December 9, 2024

   The birth of the cascading collage concept happened two years ago when we were sixty days out from the premiere of "Trailblazers & Hellraisers," Jana Bommersbach and my book at the Phippen Art Museum outside Prescott. I was feverishly trying to finalize the book and an art show at the museum and at that time I was also filling a scrapbook with narrative image combos that intrigued me. Some were quite abstract. You know, like this:

Seeking A Postive Narrative

   And, so, from there I started clipping group shots of old photos and putting them on a page and then adding my own two cents to try and find a way to connect them or find a way thru. . .

Red And Black Love Each Other

   As I started filling more pages I began to notice that even on the pages where I put dissimilar images together it still had a strange narrative power.

Narrative Scrapbook, Tombstone Page

   As disparate and non-sequential as all these images are, to my eye, they still start to tell a story! We start to connect them (the sleeping whore and the mining smokestacks, oh, yes, I see a connection!) and it all begins to cohere. It is a strange kind of miraculousness. Perhaps it's merely ridiculous and a total nonsequiter, but at any rate, that led to here. . .

Daily Whip Outs:

"Cascading collage #1"

(September 2, 2022)

Then I took this whole cascading idea down to Cattletrack Arts Compound and showed it to Mark McDowell and Brent Bond and they made it fly, and how!

Thanks to Tricia Loscher, the final cascading collage has been unanimously accepted into the Desert Caballeros Art Museum's permanent collection in Wickenburg, Arizona.

A Proud Cartoonist

And His Cascading Collage

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

—Scott Adams