Isn’t there something about the “godfather
of merz” that transcends mere homage?
Good Ol’ Boy Dada, part 3
collage artifact by J A Dixon
scrounged paper, packaging, litter
on book cover, 10.25 x 8.375 inches
Archive for the ‘Homage’ Category
The ol’ boy is at it again.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2026I am still a miniaturist at heart.
Monday, March 23rd, 2026My first rule of collage: There are no rules in collage.
Except for those imposed on oneself, such as my 2026 March Exertion, with 30 collage artworks created in 30 days. Below are six of them.
Click on each square preview to see the full image.
Follow my daily effort at Instagram.
String Theatre
Saturday, March 14th, 2026 
String Theatre
collage on structured panel by J A Dixon
scrounged promotional printing + string
11 x 14 inches (homage to T R Flowers)
The art of legacy collage
Thursday, July 10th, 2025“During the last two years at the Motherhouse, I made a real effort to ‘clean out,’ and organize everything. It was truly a freeing experience! However, I still had to decide what to do with what I wanted to keep. Around this time, I had attended the funeral of a friend who had commissioned three artworks to represent her life: ‘Body, Mind, and Spirit.’ I was immediately touched by this collage idea. From then until this writing, I have been working on my collages. I had planned to do only two: ‘Home and Family’ and ‘Ministry as a Dominican.’ My artist brought forth a third, and it is a perfect fit for my life.”
— Sister Mary Otho Ballard
Below is a triptych which represents of a type of artwork that I call “Legacy Collage.” My entry about a previous example from 2016 described the scenario of a person attempting to distinguish the difference between actual family heirlooms and other items marked for eventual disposal. Inevitably, some images and memorabilia would fall into a gray area between, 
and therein lies the potential for one or more collage compositions. If creatively preserved as wall-worthy artwork, they can remain meaningful into the future.
A retired Dominican Sister of Peace saw a collage triptych at the funeral of her friend. It was a grouping that I had collaboratively assembled with my late patron. Facing a terminal condition herself, Sister had been reducing her few possessions and arranged a commission for me to make a similar creation. She had lived an extraordinary life of educational and administrative service, including an extended ministry to serve the native people of Belize, but she was physically and spiritually detaching from all of it. Because Sister had taken a vow of poverty, her devoted nephew wanted to make an enduring memorial possible, and I was honored to accept the collage assignment.
Originally there were to be two panels — the first would document her life before convent, growing up as La Monda, part of a large, farm-based family in Kentucky. The second would be about her long and diverse life as a nun. When I took stock of all the designated ingredients, it became clear that this project would also need to be a triptych. The third panel would commemorate her active preparation for eternal life.
panel 1 ~ FORMATION ~ Farm and Family
panel 2 ~ VOCATION ~ Growth and Service
panel 3 ~ ASPIRATION ~ Love and Detachment
Sister and I worked together intermittently for nearly a year, bringing her vision into being. Her presence, wisdom, and peaceful soul have had a profound effect on my heart. It’s been one of the most personally rewarding experiences I’ve had as an artist. I met Sister’s nephew last year after the finished collages were delivered, and he was remarkably generous. As Christmas approached, her condition declined, My wife and I spent some time with Sister, but she struggled with clarity. She then asked her nephew to come for a visit and for me to be there to meet with them. He and I happened to arrive at her care center about the same time, only to learn that she had passed on a half hour before.
FORMATION ~ VOCATION ~ ASPIRATION
John Andrew Dixon
three legacy collage artworks on canvas
16 x 20 inches each
private collection
The genre is ever with us to explore
Wednesday, February 26th, 2025“I called it Merz. This new process whose principle was the use of any material. It was the second syllable of Kommerz. It first appeared in Merzbild, a painting in which, apart from its abstract forms, one could read Merz, cut and pasted from an advertisement for Kommerz und Privatbank. I was looking for a term to designate this new genre, for I could not classify my paintings under old labels such as expressionism, cubism, futurism, and so on.”
— Kurt Schwitters
Mere Scrupulosity
collage miniature on canvas panel
8 x 10 inches, in the Merz tradition
Double or nothing . . .
Friday, August 23rd, 2024
Dixon appears again at Art Space Versailles, hopeful that a buyer might be interested in the collage artwork called Renewal.
I scheduled a double event this week and it was a fine way to saddle up and ride a momentum. I was eager to point out that Renewal was on consignment at Art Space Versailles.
The studio piece began with my musing on the cyclic life of trees, which makes sense because I’m endlessly fascinated by them and since I work primarily in papers after all. Most collage artists are scroungers at heart, so I had turned to my stash, searching for potential ingredients. I found more than enough for a 12×12-inch canvas and intuitively assembled a “ground” of these found images. I think that toward the end of the process it had became as much an abstract composition as an interpretation of my thematic idea. I didn’t want it to appear too abstract or purposely surreal, so, at the closing stage, I crafted a literal seedling from individual paper components, more in the representational manner that I use for collage en plein air. I guess one could say that the culminating element pictured the birth of a tree, but, as with all life cycles, who can say when the beginning or ending actually occurs. The art itself is re-purposed paper, a clear ending for a tree, at least until inevitable decomposition takes place, and then another cycle of renewal carries on.
In contrast, the exercise in spontaneity featured below had no preconceived intent and originated as a demo miniature during my exhibition-related workshop at Paul Sawyier Public Library in Frankfort on Tuesday. I refined and completed it last night during the appearance in Versailles as a guest artist. The unfinished piece had been immediately titled by a workshop participant after the primary ingredients were juxtaposed, and I just couldn’t top her suggestion!
It joins countless other artworks that tip the Pop-ist hat to Andy Warhol (Campbell’s Soup) or Ray Johnson (Lucky Strike). But the grandfather of Pop Art was Kurt Schwitters. So much of contemporary collage is, in essence, an homage to the German innovator, and I never tire of working in the Merz tradition that he pioneered a hundred years ago.
Kick the Can
collage experiment by J A Dixon
7 x 8.5 inches
Make Your Mark
Saturday, June 1st, 2024
Make Your Mark
collage on reclaimed canvas by J A Dixon
26.5 x 26.5 inches
a dry shoal and “Vacation Merz”
Wednesday, January 31st, 2024Looking back to when I was in Upper Michigan last year… In addition to making collage landscapes outside, I exploited whatever paper fragments were at hand in the cabin. The result was this experiment in color, form, and counterpoint. Those familiar with the history of collage as a modern art will understand why I think of it as “Vacation Merz.”
Untitled (dry shoal)
collage experiment by J A Dixon
9.3125 x 11 inches
available for purchase
Final Line
Tuesday, August 18th, 2020As the full impact of navigating a declaration of pandemic struck everyone in early 2020, there was an activity that offered the sense of continuity many of us needed and a behavior that provided the social distancing all of us were expected to fulfill — a new season of creating artwork en plein air which allowed us to experience nature directly as an individual. In retrospect, I found it to be a profound source of consolation in a period of unprecedented disruption.
The first PAACK “art out” that I joined this year was a day at Perryville Battlefield, considered one of the most pristine sites where a Civil War conflict took place. There was a distinct awkwardness in the air when we met at the gathering point, but everybody soon shrugged it off and dispersed to scout locations. I found an appealing view of a hilltop and tree line off Oscar Bradley Road. A marker designated the location as where the final line of Union troops overlooked a strategic crossroads. I took a softer, more abstract approach with torn paper than I previously had. Perhaps it was something to do with a clear impression of being on hallowed ground. I left with a solid interim piece of work and strong feelings that went beyond artistic gratification. It didn’t take much follow through in the studio to complete this one to my satisfaction.
Final Line
plein air collage miniature by J A Dixon
65% /35% — site to studio
7 x 7.0625 inches
collection of the artist
Forgot to Look for America (diptych 69)
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020
Forgot to Look for America (diptych 69)
collage miniatures by J A Dixon
1.9375 x 1.9375 inches each
left square | right square
available for purchase
< back to the comprehensive page of collage diptychs
Good Ol’ Boy Dada
Monday, January 27th, 2020“When Schwitters made the first collage by literally picking up a piece of rubbish, a sweet wrapper, a bus ticket and a piece of wood, that was pure invention.”
— Sir Peter Blake
For the many who revere his art, there’s a distinct Kurt Schwitters for each of us — rebellious creator, fearless performer, relentless out-of-the-boxer, proto-beatnik, or visionary theorist. In combination with his towering individualism, he was, by reports from those who knew him, affable, witty, optimistic, entertaining, and a practical joker. This is the Kurt who would be a pleasure to “hang” with, who others in the internment camp on the Isle of Man would hear each morning, barking like a dog. 
In our local Bluegrass culture, there is a phrase for such a character. Around these parts, he likely would’ve been known as a “good ol’ boy.”
In response to the international call by Ric Kasini Kadour to build a Schwitters’ Army collection at MERZ Gallery, the two pieces I created pay tribute to this particular K.S. Both were fashioned from street debris and highway litter accumulated from my immediate vicinity. One of them was mailed to Sanquhar, Scotland. I haven’t decided what to do with “part 2.” Perhaps the series will continue.
In 2016, I wrote the following in my published essay on a hundred years of Dada: “Those of us who create collage art may not always describe our works as a tribute to the enduring, inclusive concepts of Merz, but that is precisely what they are, and we are indebted to that legacy.” As one who has never wearies of exploring the far-reaching innovations of K.S., I am content to describe myself unabashedly as a working “Merzologist.”
Schwitters may or may not have been the original artist to embed found detritus in collage, but certainly he was the first to fully master a modern-art version of the medium when it emerged at the close of the Great War. Embracing every conceivable source ingredient, he would codify the new visual vocabulary, give it an umbrella name, and bequeath the methodology to unborn generations. 
He may have sensed that the window of opportunity for him to preside over such a grand human venture was closing. He never got to take by storm the art world of 1950s New York — something eminently suited to his personality. His work and writings have had to speak for themselves.
For me, the seminal creations that launched what we know as Merz can never be separated from the man himself — the one who directed subtle, irreverent jabs toward a gang of thugs who hijacked his culture, until it was impossible to stay put, and then, after facing further persecution in Norway with his son, reckoned that an icebreaker just might evade Nazi torpedoes long enough for them to reach the coast of Scotland. Probably that dauntless, wry, “Good Ol’ Boy” side of him was satisfied to leave us with this simple thumbnail declaration:
“My name is Kurt Schwitters.
I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.”
Good Ol’ Boy Dada, part 1
collage artifact by J A Dixon
7 x 9.25 inches
Good Ol’ Boy Dada, part 2
collage artifact by J A Dixon
7 x 9.25 inches