Do you ever read the Sunday comics in full color? Did you realize you’re looking at pieces of the Sunday comics right now?

This collage is made up of pieces of the Sunday comics collected between September ’04 and March ’07. I recently took a break from my dot artwork to complete this piece.

Back in the spring of ’05 I completed two thirds of it. I used Speedball gloss polymer acrylic to adhere the cutouts. This is how it looked at the two thirds mark.

In September of ’05 I was up in Memphis antsy about whether I had a house to go home to back in Metairie. One fraternity brother living in Florida e-mailed me to see if I was all right. When I replied, I asked him who was living in Memphis that I could look up. As it turned out I found four of my fraternity brothers who were living in Memphis.

One of them, who had grown up in Memphis, is a landscape architect. He invited me to meet him on the site of an ongoing project. He and his crew were working on a basketball court with a connecting walkway to the main house. The owners of the main house bought the adjacent lot that used to have a house on it. The house had fallen apart.

When I arrived, the cement for the walkway had just been poured. A female member of the crew, with an artistic background, was sprinkling magenta and light blue pigment on the cement. She then placed a mold of sorts on top of the wet cement and stood on it. It left an imprint that gave the cement a slate-like texture. She repeated both steps for the length of the walkway. The pigments combined to make purple.

So that’s the story of this piece.