Collage has been an important part of my work since my early days in undergraduate school at the University of Nebraska. In the 1990s I began to insert collaged elements into my paintings using either large scale Xeroxes or smaller copies used as multiples. In 2005 I put the painting aside and began to concentrate on pure collage. After receiving my MFA from Tulane University in New Orleans I moved to Dallas I became a college instructor. As well as teaching studio courses I taught art history and my work has always been influenced by my study and fascination with the history of art. A number of artists have influenced my aesthetic concepts: Hanna Hoch, the Russian Modernists and the Pop artists. As I work with found images the scale of my work is controlled by the size of the images and the image fragments found. This intimacy of scale, I feel, draws the viewer in for closer study forcing them to concentrate on the complexity of the seemingly simple constructions.