Non-objectively collaging

Artist Donnie Copeland has an exhibit of collages on display at the Regional Art Center. (Submitted photo)
Artist Donnie Copeland has an exhibit of collages on display at the Regional Art Center. (Submitted photo)

Step into the secure galleries at the Regional Arts Center downtown now and you'll see what appear at first glance to be paintings that depict, perhaps, some sort of geological markings.

Except that, seen properly, that's not what they are. They're just themselves, a testament to the desire to create, compose and order the world through art. They're not representational, simply collages full of stripes and colored textures, explains the artist.

It's the work of Arkadelphia, Ark.-based Donnie Copeland, who teaches at Ouachita Baptist University and says he's not necessarily striving to make pictures of anything.

Copeland, whose work is on display through Jan. 13, thinks of them as abstract collages.

"Really, they would fit in the category of non-objective work," he explained, noting they're at their best when they're viewed as simply the image they create, not viewed as something else.

But others do see images in them, which he says is understandable. "I think the first thing that someone ever mentioned to me was like a flag, stripes of the American flag," Copeland said. It was a piece that used a terra cotta red and white.

He also thinks people can see the landscape of our area or the paths of rivers winding through the landscape in these collages. Having earned his BA at Ouachita Baptist, gone elsewhere and then returned, he's seen the striated pattern carved in rocks here, too, where roads cut through.

This mode of collage is one he's worked on for a decade, pretty much since returning to Arkansas to teach. He came to it through painting, which is his primary artistic background and what he teaches. He was inspired by abstract artists like Frank Stella and Richard Diebenkorn.

Copeland's collages use painted paper, for one thing. He will paint the paper and stack several sheets together, at least two sheets and maybe as many as eight sheets, and then cut it. Once the paper has been cut, he chooses which cutting to apply to a certain area of the canvas.

"I was thinking about all the great abstract non-objective canvases that are out there," Copeland said, and he thought about how those artists from the 1960s and '70s related to the places where they lived. "I think the minimalists were really good at thinking about that."

Another part of the process for Copeland is the preliminary drawing he makes, continuing with an editing process that helps him consider issues like movement. This drawing becomes a template before he starts the cutting. It's what he enjoys the most, the engaged process of it all.

"That's what I really want to do is enjoy the making of something," the artist said. He enjoys working figuratively, but he felt he knew where he was going there so the sense of discovery was lost.

"With these pieces, you might wind up doing something maybe not quite so straightforward," Copeland said.

Just before embarking on this new mode of painting, he'd worked on still lifes that commented in some way on culture, but they didn't have the impact he was looking for. And then he found this new way to explore. He recalls cutting out an oval once that was painted on one side, but when he flipped it over he saw that a fuzzy color came through.

"I just had this bit of an epiphany, this little moment," Copeland recalled, and so he started thinking about the painted sides of paper versus the non-painted and how they provide contrast to each other.

His work in this mode has found its way to Little Rock, Dallas and elsewhere, and these collages are ones he has on hand at the moment. Copeland earned his MFA in painting at the University of Dallas. He's now an associate professor of visual arts at Ouachita Baptist, where he's also chairman of the Department of Visual Arts.

(Admission is free. The Regional Arts Center is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, at 321 W. 4th St. More info: TRAHC.org or 903-792-8681.) 

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