You Asked, no. 14: Spiring up from leaf litter: Mary Bullington and collage

Amid the rubble.
All images via Mary Boxley Bullington.

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series is composed of our questions to each other. Soon I'll post an index to our conversations, as well as some information about how to see more of Mary's work, and how to get in touch with her. (Note the close, with a reference back to an earlier post with the Tarot card of the Fool heading over the cliff.)

Youmans: I think of the floor of your collage studio as leaf litter--a compost composed of dropped fragments that is continually being stirred up and giving birth to something new. Can you talk about your materials and method, as well as your sense of having a call to be an artist?

Bullington: Years ago, my brother Andy, coming into a studio paved with my collage scraps, said, "You could make a whole series just using this stuff, and call it Floor Art." And I do! Here we go back into the idea of the materiality of my work, and how this affects the process of making it. But first, a definition: Collage = any work of art made primarily by cutting or tearing and adhering papers and/or textiles to a support, using the basic principles of design to create unity and surprise. (The word collage derives from the French word coller, to paste.) Collage is made out of 2-D material cut or torn, arranged, and pasted into place. It's a very forgiving technique in that you can cut out the bad and save the good, and also, a highly morphic way to work, because you're constantly moving bits and pieces around, sometimes completely changing appearances and structures as you do.

Lion collograph to make collage pieces.

For the last 20 years, one hallmark of my collages has been that I create virtually all the materials I use in them, by painting, drawing, and mono-printing rag paper that can be easily glued flat to a painting on another piece of paper or to a more rigid support. But this method of working evolved gradually. When I started out in the 1980s, I made my collages from sheets of commercially colored papers, especially a paper called Color-Aid whose surface is beautifully silkscreened in a solid color including every hue, tint, and shade in the design spectrum.

Lion early on, with human mask.

I began to shift away from using commercially colored papers in my collage-making after the summer of 1986, when I rewarded myself for passing my oral exams at Indiana University by buying gouache. I started painting abstract designs on paper and incorporating these paintings into my collages. After I moved from Bloomington to North Carolina in 1987, I stopped making collages for several years to concentrate on teaching writing at UNC-Greensboro and researching my dissertation in medieval lit. Then, one day, circa 1990, I got mad and pulled a large, very bad painting on paper of a naked lady out from under the bed, dismembering and rearranging her until she became a much smaller, much more compact and much more interesting figure of a man in a coat and tie. I called it "The King," because it featured only the shoulders and head, with a tragic face wreathed in a crown of flames. I recognized immediately that this collage was far superior to anything I'd ever done—and represented a new direction: I could not only fit painted papers into a design, but make the entire collage out of a single painting by cutting it up and reinventing it.

Lion, approximately stage three, on olive ground.

This became for me and is still a major modus operandi. I find the materials I create often inspire invention and help me generate new work. Ideas usually come either while I'm painting or drawing freely, or while I'm looking at a new painting on paper to see where I can take it—and whether cutting it up and collaging will add dimension and interest, or will just ruin it. And often, as you say, I get ideas when sorting through my scraps. (In addition to the floor, and small boxes and baskets of scraps, I have 4 waist-deep hampers in which I put my left-over cuttings.) Now and then I'll make up a game to play with myself using scraps: Mary, pick up 10 pieces off the floor and put them on top of that painting over there. Then I'll add a new rule: You have to tear the pieces, not cut them; you must throw them, not place them. You can't use any blue. Etc.

Lion's head

Trial and error is my mainstay. Making a collage is often a bit like going to the optometrist's office and trying different lenses: Is this one better? Or is this one better? Half the time I don't know! I'll spend all day— two or three days—laying out a collage, then come into the studio, look at it, and shake all the pieces off and start over. Not very efficient, this method! And there are all sorts of other inefficiencies. One of the problems with collage is that it has to lie flat until it's glued, so you don't see it in the perspective that you will when it's hanging on a wall. Not unusual to find, after glueing a collage down, that a whole section is wrong—or that it hasn't got enough "air." Ten days work down the drain. If I'm patient enough, sometimes I can cut it up and redo it on a fresh ground. But then there are also the lucky accidents! A fragment slips from its place to a much better place. A little abstract scrap falls over a face and I see she now has a wonderful scowl now that I would never have thought to put there. Once I photographed a newly finished abstract piece, and damn! when the image came up on the computer screen, I saw it was a lion—a wonderful, compact little lion. Been working on it for days and never saw that lion before, but there he was, by jiminy! Now I had to work to enable other people to see him! (And all the while, a little voice whispered in my ear, "But he will never sell!")

Standing His Ground. 2011-2015

To be a full time, fully committed artist, I think you have to be more than a little obsessive-compulsive--and a little crazy. Would a sane person commit all her time to and pin her economic life—now and future--on the whims of a market that may or may not care a fig about collaged lions? Or Nazis? Right now that's one of the things I'm working on—Nazis. And I find I'm channeling my favorite German Expressionists as I do. (But they will never sell!) How dare you take such folly seriously? How dare you do it full time? Wouldn't it be wiser to have another job to provide real income? Well, yes, it would. But I know from experience that if I hedge my bets, I will never be but so-good of an artist.

"Who Peynted the Lion?"

And then, on top of all this, there's always the possibility—the probability, really—that the work will fail. An artist has to be willing to make some stuff that's seriously BAD—I mean, god-awful. Not on purpose, mind you. Again, my brother Andy, a full-time musician, says it as well as anyone: "You're never going to do anything really good unless you are willing to stink up the room--completely stink it up!" So sometimes you work up a rage, and then you work in a rage. Very few artists talk about this, but it's true. Other times you work in terror. When I find myself going out on a limb and getting scared, I will start talking to myself: "Do I have any idea what I'm doing? NO!!!" "Okay, then, let’s do it some more!" Sometimes things go bust—you ruin something good, and it's really not retrievable. The best you can do for now is shove it into a drawer for a month—or for a year or two or three. Or you have to cut out the part or parts that might be usable and pitch the rest. And off and on, if you are growing as an artist, your eye will change—your taste will change. I have several photo files labeled "Work Destroyed for No Good Reason." Almost every time I troll through my photo folders, I find new images to put in the "Destroyed" albums. Very discouraging. But you can't let it defeat you. After all, you chose this life, didn't you? You knew you were crazy, didn't you? But the truth is, Marly, on some level, we didn't choose this life—it chose us. But we did choose against common sense to listen to the inner call—and to obey it.

That obedience—and the discipline to work in its traces—is part of the ethic of art-making. When I look back on the last 20 years or so, I realize I became a visual artist basically on a hunch—a pretty good hunch, maybe, and obviously a better hunch than becoming a medievalist turned out to be. Or being a poet, for that matter. Because, as you said, Marly, in your answer to my question about the Artist-as-Fool in The Book of the Red King, the Fool—that is, the Artist--knows he's found his true home when "he becomes fruitful." For that, I found myself willing to step heedlessly off the cliff into thin air.

The mess on Mary's studio floor.