Collage Artist Masterfully Controls Chaos

Florida-based artist Derek Gores creates brilliant collage masterpieces on canvas using recycling magazines, labels, and other found materials. Over the years, he has become a master at controlling chaos within his artwork.

"I start with a photo shoot, play around deconstructing digitally, and then recreate the tones on canvas with aggressive textures from magazines, maps, song lyrics, etc," Gores explains in an interview with Sour Harvest. "I was the typical tight artist at age 17 but saw the light at the end of that particular tunnel when I was introduced to swashbuckling painters and talking trees and have been fleeing forward into looseness ever since.

"I now like tools that are big and clumsy and open up the range of touch, including the process of ripping paper in collage. What I initially thought of as an academic exercise has become heavier and more real than anything else I’ve sunk my teeth into. I started with my love of the figure, the living breathing real thing, and with this fashion/ German expressionist aesthetic I get to mix in abstract art and shape play."

Derek Gores' website