This Collage series is derived from my own photographs taken in hot and humid Kyoto in summer 2010. The camera was not in accord with the high humidity and provided unusual images of gardens, ryokans and palaces! Items such as trees, plants, sculptures, gravestones, daily life objects, painted doors were perceived in a fairly abstract way. The images were alive with almost psychedelic colors and the show began to evolve in my mind. I decided to incorporate these photographs into collages! And then came the earthquake and the tsunami and the images took on a new meaning. Broken objects were now seen as pieces of life that needed to be put together. So images were torn and then reassembled, as observed in the small collages.

My favorite images of ancient objects in the ryokans, including the platter of lemons in the Yuzuya ryokan in Gion, were incorporated and duplicated in the bigger collages. And then, there was a photograph of my favorite garden that I decided to transfer to canvas, after photoshop treatment, to generate variations on the theme of Japanese Garden. In most collages, Japanese papers of various kinds were incorporated to unify the works. The red lacquer color is also an integral part of the paintings and of daily life in Japan.

In winter 2015, I added several new collages to the series and reworked some previous ones following a course on textural effects taken at Toronto School of Arts. Dimensional depth is created by the use of various mediums and/or by painting the collated images.