Recent Contemporary Abstract Artwork of Santa Barbara Artist Marlene Struss

I am Santa Barbara's "Paster of Light," best known for my work with recycled magazines in a process I call photage. The basis of my unique photage technique is a sensitively built palette of complementary colors and textures from magazines. Like the unique DNA of an unborn baby, the palette contains all the visual building blocks that determine the look and size of the piece. The palette is the reason each work of art is one of a kind. I usually have at least ten palettes going at one time, and often a photage is spawned from the scraps or subpalette of a previous piece.

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My object is to conjure a coherent image from the cut fragments, employing an organizing chemistry based on continuity of content, color, and dynamic and spacial effects created by the play of shadow and light. I work within the limits of the palette, Ouija board style, pushing and placing and replacing each element until it is in perfect harmony with the image as a whole, all the while avoiding imposing a preconceived plan or picture. In this way both the creativity and the creation remain active and flexible much longer in an organic process and the image seems to suggest itself as it grows. This is the most pleasurable and also the most time consuming part of the photage process. But the longer I work with a piece, the stronger the image becomes.

Though the resulting artwork is abstract, I imagine some of the elements as objects or characters and some as atmosphere, location, or plane and groupings perhaps as activities, thus rooting the work in a reality of sorts. The familiar yet unrecognized everyday magazine fragments and the traditional measures of beauty employed, such as balance, color harmony, and fluidity found in photage serve to evoke reminiscence and make the abstraction mysterious but at the same time accessible to all viewers.