My work? The subjectivity of it?
The subject, what do you do?
I think of my collage work as political satire.
It's everything that I try to do with my paintings that doesn't work.
It works in my collages because I am using images that already exist
and already have a power, like this one.
You see it? It might be effected on the background.
See?
What is it?
It's a little boy with a gun, another gun behind it.
But this image already exists and it was probably in a kid's magazine.
So you were born in Kuwait, right?
I was born in Romania and because of communism we had to leave immediately for Kuwait.
I moved to Romania after my parents divorced because it was safe to move there again.
And I lived there only five years after which I moved to the US.
How old were you when you moved there?
To the America.
As I said, I was almost 15. I moved to Dallas, Texas.
How old were you?
I was horrible.
Why?
Because it was the South.
It was five days before September 11th in America.
I was going through a lot of changes under Bush and the start of the Gulf of the Iraqi war.
And everything, it was not a good time to have an Arabic name.
I've moved so much in my life that it doesn't take me long to make a place home.
As long as I'll have my books, that place will feel like home.
Books as in collage material.
These are things that I've cut over the past three months from magazines in New York.
From magazines that I found either at Hell's Kitchen or at Williamsburg.
When I see an image, I know that I'll use it someday.
Maybe not at that moment.
But I might use it someday.
I ripped it out.
I like using military propaganda a lot because I'm obsessed with war material.
That probably has to do with my first memories.
My first memories being the Gulf War.
The coalition used overwhelming air power to defeat a brutal dictator and free a nation.
I just remember not being allowed to go outside.
Being so angry with my mom that she wouldn't let me go outside.
Of course I didn't understand why.
Telling to a five-year-old that there's a war outside is like, what, I don't know.
Just let me go outside.
And my mom was pregnant at the time with my brother.
So I was just, you know, I was losing my spot.
And everyone was dictating what I was doing.
So war for me and war images became very important.
And I used that extensively in my work.
When did I start to make art?
I don't remember not making art.
I don't know.
It was, you know, like some kids could do sports.
Some kids could do theater.
For me, I just liked sitting in a corner and drawing.
It was a way to distract myself from everyone that was going on around me, making a make-believe world.
It was the way for me to belong to something.
You know, it's something that never changes.
You know, it's like math.
I always had math and I had art.
I was the only thing that, each country was the same and it didn't matter that I didn't understand.
It was all about hand gestures.
Really, math is a lot like art to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, in my collages, yeah, it's kind of the same.
Well, I don't know.
I think they've evolved, definitely evolved composition-wise.
I think of them more in a painting, a color theory method than I did in the beginning.
In the beginning, I just thought of images on top of each other, but now I think of it more as a painting.
Because I am trained as a painter and that is my true, true love.
But painting and I, we are in a fight right now.
This is my little painting box that I haven't used in forever.
But one day I'll come back.
This was my favorite color, cadmium orange, so beautiful.
Are you ever afraid you've lost it?
Well, kind of, yeah.
Yeah, of course, but I hope I didn't.
I hope not.
So I think painting is a lot harder than people think.
Making good paintings is a lot harder than people think.
Making good collages, it's easy because the images exist.
And all you have to think of is the composition and how you can say a story.
I think collage is more of a storytelling method and painting is like a movie.
Because a painting has everything in it.
But the collage, you can just interpret whatever you want out of it.
Because the images are from all over the place.
So it could mean something else to me than it does to you, depending on what cut out you focus on most.
When a painting, everything is in it.
You think you can't interpret the painting in another way?
No.
And maybe that's my problem. Maybe because I do put painting on a pedestal.
And it is because of the artists I look at.
I'm obsessed with the German expressionists.
And I try to do that kind of work.
But I didn't live in their time.
And I am not a German.
But I don't take that into consideration.
I fight. I want to be able to do what they did, but I can't.
So I gave up on it for now.
Found it!
Oh, let me see.
What do you want?
Because it's for a car that I'm making for Julia's mom.
And that's going to be perfect.
