Slide 1
Bearden assembled people and places from collage fragments
Romare Bearden used collage to construct scenes of people and places. Separate materials become a world through their relationships on the surface.
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His works can combine paper with drawing and paint. The finished image is therefore built through both selection of fragments and newly applied marks.
Slide 2
Memory could combine more than one photographic instant
Bearden drew on family, cultural and regional memories. His collages can bring together experiences that were not recorded in one photographic instant.
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Tomorrow I May Be Far Away connects with his ties to the American South. The composition can function as a remembered world rather than a literal snapshot of one event.
Slide 3
A visibly assembled face reveals changes of scale and texture
Different fragments can meet within a figure's face or body. Changes of scale and texture keep the act of construction visible.
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That discontinuity does not prevent recognition. The viewer can identify a person while also noticing how the image is assembled, holding representation and material process together.
Slide 4
Tomorrow I May Be Far Away adds a song association
The title Tomorrow I May Be Far Away draws on a song. Music adds a cultural association to the visual scene without being physically audible.
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The National Gallery of Art connects the title with Bearden's complex attachment to the South. A borrowed phrase can link personal memory and broader cultural expression within one work.
Slide 5
Earlier materials gain new roles in the composition
A fragment carries traces of an earlier printed image or material use. Bearden's new arrangement gives it another role within the composition.
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The work can therefore join different visual sources into a coherent experience. Its unity depends on composition, not on all its parts having begun in the same place or moment.
Sources
- Drawing with Scissors with Romare Bearden
National Gallery of Art
- Tomorrow I May Be Far Away
National Gallery of Art