I am always stumbling onto Jeffrey Meyer's work on the internet, it was only a matter of time before I featured his work here! He has such a huge body of work, and there is a wide range but you can definitely recognize his collages by his style. What drew me to them especially was the vibrancy of colour, which he plays up somewhere in each piece.

Jeffrey Meyer
http://goofbutton.com/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/goofbutton/
Born in Indiana, currently in the Pacific Northwest

Describe your work in 10 words or less.

Well-crafted but tight-assed.

What do you like to work with (magazines, photographs, vintage)? Be specific!

No preferences -- anything I can find. I used to buy runs of magazines from the 1940s-70s. I pick up maybe 20 books and magazines a week from the local library's free pile. A decade ago I worked as a janitor in a different, enormous library and I'm still using stuff I hoarded from their discards and recycling. I occasionally root through dumpsters when it's not too conspicuous. So generally I don't pay for materials.

How long have you been creating collages and what made you start?

Since high school, I guess... 1986? But only in the last few years have I really concentrated on collage to the exclusion of everything else I'm interested in, such as cartooning (which is probably the most financially thankless and wretchedly difficult medium to work in, as far as I can tell).

Are you solely an artist, or do you work in another profession?

I quit my last full-time job (peon in a video store) three years ago. I had saved a fair amount of money, and thanks to the generosity of my girlfriend I not only haven't had to pay rent, but I've also had a nice studio space (garage) to work in as well, where I can get high as a kite from glue fumes and 100-year-old encyclopedia mold. But it's been pretty precarious, and month to month I had no idea if I could pay my relatively meager credit card bill. Somehow or other I managed to sell about $2000 worth of artwork last year (this includes originals, prints, image use rights for album covers, etc.)... but of course I spent God knows how much on supplies and postage, so it's more or less a losing game for now. Not to mention I spend about 25 (mostly thankless) hrs a week obnoxiously "promoting" myself via online submissions to blogs, magazines, galleries, etc. which is time I'd much rather be making more art, of course. It's actually been so bad lately I've had to go on food stamps and get a part-time job refinishing floors. I expect I'll have cancer soon, yay!

Do you have any formal art training?

Couple years of life drawing in college. I had excellent teachers, but after filling 10,000 sketchbook pages I consider myself self-taught. Is collage even taught in school?

Explain your favourite techniques.

First I pour about six fingers of scotch, light a cigarette, drop "Shut Up, Little Man" in the CD player, then I -- just kidding. I don't know if I have any favorite techniques other than sorting endlessly through piles of pictures until something - color, shape, texture - catches my eye or suggests a larger meaning, at which point I separate it and keep shuffling until I find another image that somehow "matches" or complements the first. It's a pretty tedious process, but most of the time I know right away if something works (or doesn't). One thing I think I do well is "hide" which parts of my pictures are actually collaged -- there's often a primary image or figure which is obviously placed there by me, but I also spend a lot of time carefully constructing backgrounds, etc. which are composed of several disparate sources.

Describe your favourite piece ever created.

Well, the next day I disdain them all... but I think a few are successful, even pleasing: "Broken Dome" "Sugar Lights" "Cave at the Edge of the Park" "Blush" "Easter" "Borealis" "Hair 4" "Arcade Nebula"

What other artists do you admire?

Vanessa Lamounier, whose stuff has a looseness I envy (and I really can't tell if she's using scissors or making work digitally, so there's a nice tension there) and she's one of the few people using fashion imagery in an interesting way -- it seems both celebratory and subversive at the same time. Jason Overby, a cartoonist whose stories and/or content make no sense to me at all, but his combination of collage and drawing is remarkable to look at, like Sol LeWitt meets Gary Panter.

Thanks Jeffrey!