Craig Upson

Craig Upson
Berkeley, California, USA

STATEMENT

My art, whether it is assemblage, painting or collage, is predominately figurative.

Currently I’m working on a series of figurative and portrait pieces: collage of found paper on board. They all are inspired by images dating from a time before color photography (or at least before color photography was commonplace). Since the source imagery doesn’t have color, and frequently is low resolution with little contrast it leaves me with a lot of freedom to invent a rich, and frequently vivid, tableau–it frees me from preconceived notions–while still evoking a theme. Each piece’s topic is from problems that seem important in our world today–but the source image is from a bygone era–lending a contemporary take on an older but still very relevant topic. This adds tension and currency to the original theme. The themes that most concern me are inequity, historic & systemic discrimination and the importance of truth and science.

I start by scouring for inspirational images–either from anonymous photographs or historical archives. I assemble and recombine several images into a new black and white composition then augment that image with hand drawn elements–tying the disparate sources together. I use this new composition to draw value regions–and create a map that will guide the collage assembly process.

I have a large collection of ephemera for sourcing textures. Currently I’m most interested in textiles–as this adds a lot of visual complexity and dilutes any single element’s visual weight. There is no “anchor” element in my collages, as I tend to stay away from images that are too full of themselves–that are recognizable or are too visually or conceptually loaded. The voice of the piece is built up by the accumulation of many textures–and no single piece of ephemera talks too loudly or reveals the theme.

I hand cut the textures for each region. Frequently I’ll cut numerous pieces for the same region to see which ones work best, i.e. which has the right value and punch. Sometimes I’ll layer them almost, but not quite, on top of each other to add tension to the edge. In the end the final piece doesn’t contain any of the source image–it is completely built up of found textures.

I know I’m done when I feel the eye is challenged to find a center and in doing so discovers the theme.

BIO

Craig Upson is a self-taught artist living in Berkeley, California. He works in sculpture, painting and collage: all with a figurative focus. With an academic background in the sciences his artwork combines both digital and analog work: sometimes both within a single piece. His work has been shown at The Cornell Museum of Art, Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, New England Fire and History Museum, Gallery 323 West, NYC among others. He can be found on Instagram @craigupson.

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