The Collage Journal: Peter Jacobs

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.

The collages are solely created from the images, colors and texts of that day’s newspaper. In my various approaches, each day I extract, redefine and compose the media’s elements in many ways. They are paintings with paper, theatrical stages of abstracted color and rhythms, layers that imbue surreal narratives, symbolism hidden in humor, the irony of culture, and pure visual perception.

The Collage Journal is integrated in my daily life as a meditation, contemplation and daily source of creative expression. Over 2,900 collages reside in over 246 Strathmore books. I have thus-far used 138 self-healing cutting boards, 296 Exacto blades, and 245 glues-sticks.

I have shared each day’s collage on that day, every day for the past three years on my blog (www.thecollagejournal.blogspot.com) and on my facebook page. It has become integrated into the daily lives of many others through social media.

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

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Visit each of the complete first Seven Years

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

• Featured Artist on State of The Arts: New Jersey Public Television