My life in art started in collage. Coming from Vermont, I had experienced the glorious colors of the seasons, each surging to fill its time with a different palette unique to the particular cycle of the calendar. Coming into New York City from Manhattanville College where I was an undergraduate, I experienced for the first time some of the finest museums in the world. A new universe unfolded.
Out of this opening of eye and soul came my first collage – a large, evolving work composed of cutouts from magazines – on the yellow wall in my dorm room in Spellman Hall. Later I would use materials that I had created, but then images from magazines sufficed, taking me through the Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit’s hole to the inner world that art and literature afforded. I loved that collage.
Fascination with collage emerged again when, as a Maryland high school English teacher, I saw the pages of Henri Matisse’s book – Jazz – under glass cabinets at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. I now own a copy of that book, purchased from a collectibles dealer in Vermont who found it at the bottom of a box of fabric.
When I subsequently encountered the exhibition of Matisse’s collage cutouts at the East Wing of the National Art Gallery in Washington, DC, I was thoroughly smitten. His collages – walls large – dazzled. Climbing the stairs to see them in the top gallery felt like a pilgrimage, even as it does today.
In 2001, when I came home to Vermont, my passion for collage resurfaced. Increasingly, I had come to see life as a mixture of things, and collage allowed me to draw on all my experiences, feelings, thoughts – and materials. In fact, I had kept nearly every paper on which I had made an art mark, turning these into my bank of materials, my cloth.
By cutting shapes from images from many years, I tapped into the sense and substance of the fabric of my own life as I had lived it and made art from life as I saw it. Each new shape from a different time conjured sensations long latent. I put them into new juxtapositions, often starting with a central shape – like a vase, or the archetypal shape of a woman. I thought of sonnets, which have a repetitive discipline, yet are unique, not unlike humans, who are the same yet different. The process of combining the universal with the individual became a working mantra.
The process flourished. I cut from paintings and drawings I had done; from photographs I had taken, often of flower I had planted; and from paper painted just for particular colors. Often the shapes left after the cutouts were made became new pieces used in the work. The act of cutting seemed a form of drawing, and discovering the line had its own dynamic. I glued, painted over and under and around, added more pieces, drew in ink, all the while building the collage until it was a fused whole.
During this period, I again encountered collage in a visit to the National Art Gallery’s East Wing, this time to see the Romare Bearden exhibition. His groundbreaking, breathtaking, beautiful work ignited a desire to make more and bigger collages. I came home to a winter, and made three warm collages, one of them 20 x 30 inches, titled Transformation.
Now I am also using cutouts from my photographs; creating iconic women collages with titles like Joie de Vivre, Protectress, Heart Warrior, Soulfarer, Dreamer; and contemplating making large-scale pieces.
For this work, nature offers a ready inventory of shapes and colors. It presents a kaleidoscopic repertoire of imagery. It is a replenishing resource that yields a vocabulary of shapes and colors, which speak from the spirit and the heart.
I believe collage inspires a special freedom: to embrace the mixture of things in life – within and without – and to create from these pieces and parts, new wholes that are of time and transcend it.
Vermont art critic Marc Awodey reviewed the exhibition of work by Linda Durkee and three other artists at ArtPath Gallery in Burlington, VT, in 2008. Writing in the May 28, 2008, issue of Seven Days, he said: “The shows represent solid bodies of work by a quartet of Vermont painters.”
In discussing her work, Awodey said: “Henri Matisse famously described collage as ‘drawing with scissors,’ and Durkee’s collages reflect that tradition. She writes, ‘My imagery looks to nature for the vocabulary of shapes and colors.’ Indeed, the Danby-based artist organizes those shapes and colors into intricately rhythmic abstractions.”
“Transformation,” he continued, presents a “horizontal scene with finely cut layers of shapes rolling along undulating green hills beneath a cerulean-blue firmament.”
