"Krishna's Bedtime." Hand-Cut Paper Collage (Winter 2020)
Channel: Karch Madhu
Date: 11/02/2020

Employing the power of symbolic juxtaposition, the mixed media collage art of Karch Madhu arrests the busy, judging mind, catapulting the viewer into a regressive, pre-cognitive state where sublime wonder can be encountered in its rugged and unclad form. None of the essential elements of the Heart can ever be shrunken to the size of a thought. One may be looking at paint, canvas, paper, or ink, but what is seen when Art is performing its Divine duty is something more ancient and familiar than anything the mind can manufacture or cling to. Some might assume that the ideas of the artist fuel the creation of the work; that the painter applies the pigment, or the sculptor carves the stone. The true artist knows that she is herself being sculpted by something larger than the limited mental creature called “me,” and that the work which emerges is no mere product of the artist’s mind, but is the expression of Creation itself, wherein the artist’s feelings, thoughts, and hands are themselves the brushstrokes of some benevolent beyond. 

True art is conceived not in the mind of the artist, but when the independent “I” steps aside to allow the wider winds of Creation to blow the composition into some freshly framed Cosmos, giving the power of antediluvian archetype, mystery, and myth the opportunity to whisper their ways unto the world. In the creation of original collage art, magazines, books, and postcards are hunted in Central Texas thrift shops and bargain bins. Images are meticulously selected, cut out, and composed together. Each individual piece has its own far flung origin. A figure from the Ancient East may come to waltz within a scene from the Italian Renaissance. Antiquity and Modernity hold hands on a single canvas, exchanging a passionate glance. Something utilitarian and ordinary may appear alongside the timeless expansive silence of deep space. The images might come from vintage books from the 1950’s or 60’s or from the pages of last month’s periodical. From a great diversity of publication, time, and ancestry, they come together in a single coherent whole, like pilgrims from divergent cultural roots praying in unison at the same altar site. Merging imagery from Americana folk art, science and technology, aboriginal and indigenous traditions, and the natural world, each piece is arranged and composed, and later congealed into permanence under varnish and glue. The poetic composites that emerge can be anachronistic and surreal, quixotic, lyrical, or arresting, as the elements of color, form, texture and flow offer suggestions to the viewer that are both fresh and familiar. When all of the immigrants of culture, vintage, and ancestry have settled together within their new community on canvas, I may sign the name, “Karch,” but with the recognition that it is the Ancient and Unnameable who has created the piece. The one who writes the name is himself only being written.