Throughout this site you will find a variety of imagery, much of what has been made here perhaps conveying a sense of provocation. Collage has been a favored medium for some thirty plus years and all are made by hand from cut- and-pasted paper materials and found/scavenged objects. The term collage is used as a generalization here as some of these images may be regarded as montage, photomontage, assemblage, mixed media or whatever. Unless otherwise noted, most all are 8-1/2” x 11” or smaller for purposes of computer to printer scanning and editing. Examples of earlier work (late 1960s-1980s) include acrylics, sketches-drawings, pastels and colored pencils.
As an artist, it’s possible to be influenced by other artists whose work we have never seen—artists of whom we are utterly unaware—until one day someone tells us that our work reminds them of that someone else or we discover their work well after we have been unconsciously-subconsciously working in a similar vein. Pablo Picasso once remarked, “Every human being is a colony.” The greatest challenge any artist faces is to make his or her body of work more than merely a ancillary postscript to what has already been done by others who came before them.
Some may be mislead by the name given to this website. Legbaland is a metaphor for both Papa Legba and what is called a loa or one who serves as an intermediary between the loa and humanity. Here, the metaphorical loa is being fed the sustenance of art. There are no gods being worshipped here. The late novelist James Salter said it best when he stated in his Burning the Days memoir, “I do not worship gods but I like to know they are there.” Other favorite quotes include:
“The mainstream of any culture tends to be less than admirable.”
—Jim Harrison
“Art is form but inspiration comes from chaos.”
—Charles Henri Ford
“Art is Love is God.”
—Wallace Berman