Tag Archives: Collage

Synthesized Judgement (original)

Synthesized Judgement (October 22nd, 2025), by Evan Travnicek. Mixed media on paper. Dimensions: 10.5″ x 17.5″

Behind not caring, there are layers of care. The ballerina’s back is faced towards the viewer as she faces an audience in her world. I didn’t consciously plan this piece. It just happened as I successively selected cutouts from magazines that I cut out. It isn’t exactly William S. Burroughs’ cutup technique to poke into the unknown universe for inspiration because I allowed my conscious self to be a main part in the creative process. My muse guided me. 

This piece was me positively smashing through another long creative block. Creatively working through the vicissitudes of life, mean people, and one’s own unseen shadow can be a route to more creativity and growth. It looks like the ballerina is flipping off whoever is to her left as she walks forward. The manufactured flower is completely turned away from the ballerina. I wasn’t thinking about these psychological things when I was making the piece. 

The perspective leading off into an unseen horizon lining the top background of this illustration unifies the divergences in the foreground, thus suggesting peace. I created a major theme of stability because of the dominant horizontal lines composing the image, but inside that stability are imperfections creating dynamic qualities that cause interest for the viewer. 

I feel this is the most successful formal piece I have made since Foothill Neighborhood because I incorporated cutouts, acrylic washes, pen and ink, gauche, watercolor, and oil paint based transfer drawing techniques. This process used to be new to me, so I didn’t feel like I had a handle on it, but with this piece, I feel more confident in how I handled its outcome. 

I titled this piece Synthesized Judgement because I’ve been re-reading The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant lately, and he wrote about how our minds synthesize our worlds and the contents of our minds into a synthetic unity so that we understand things in an orderly way better. I took a creative route to illustrate what our minds do with this image because of the cutouts from magazines, the lines defining objects, people, and boundaries, and the colors adding degrees of intensity for character and variation.

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October 25, 2025 · 8:35 pm

Foothill Neighborhood

Original mixed media watercolor on homemade paper collage surface

24” x 10”

This image is digitally mounted

Gradients and progressions stand out in particular to me currently. The illusory creation of space using delineated gradients and progressions will never cease to repel and fascinate me in cycles of disgust and redemption. I get disgusted by the limitations of two dimensions to work with in attempting to suggest dimensions past the third. But I then get fascinated by the possibility of successfully visually communicating dimensions past the third utilizing only the surface of a two dimensional plane. 

The simultaneity is already accomplished on a two dimensional surface because you don’t see the eventful sequences of times I built up the image you’re looking at. You just see it all at once. This instantaneous production reflected in your mind is a doorway to other dimensions. 

This mixed media watercolor painting is painted on glued together pieces of paper, pages from magazines, and printouts. Before drawing the linear composition, in which I filled in the spaces with watercolors, I washed the surface with a diluted primer paint so that the images and text from the collaged surface would show through to the eye, hence subtly emphasizing the notion of layers built up through sessions of work and time. I used variations of the color yellow to fill the spaces of the buildings because yellow is a bright, warm, outstanding color to use against a more neutral background. 

I intentionally made a progression from light to dark with the lines dividing the landscape from foreground to background, and then the sky. The sky is an evening or early morning dark blue. I wanted to convey the idea of a staff or lines on a sheet of musical notes. The staff is the hilly lines of the landscape and the notes are the buildings and the characters walking around on the paths. Hence my joy of capturing the illusion of space with abstracted lines, shapes, and colors. 

Evan Travnicek

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June 25, 2024 · 4:51 am

A La Carte Blanche (version 6)

Digitized media on paper
Dimensions: 32 inches x 25 inches
Ltd Edition print to 25

I don’t know what to write about this. It makes me think of some of Georges Braque’s paintings. Braque certainly inspires me. His form of cubism is more human, more warm in my opinion. At least some of his later work.

This piece is like a still life. It doesn’t seem that inspiring to me though. I’ve been struggling to develop a style I feel passionate about for the last decade or so. I lost my studio in Nebraska when I moved to this ghetto state of sociopathy in 2006.

In Nebraska, I was creating large paintings like Paradigm Shift, and The Socratic Tree. I was getting into truly mixed media of trash, dirt, sawdust, found objects, branches, fabrics, nails, and twigs. I was really on to something developing my own body of work. But, as change in life is merciless with its lessons of spiritual tragedy, the farm became a family loss.

I struggle with my own bitterness. Since I was born, life has had a love affair of depriving me of many things others take for granted. I wrote one time in a sketchbook from the 1990s that “my art is my lifelong love affair” or something like that. Life loves to taunt me with beautiful trolls who love throwing salt on my mortally afflicted heart because the trolls see me as being more blessed than they are, so they have to “get back.” It doesn’t matter how much I really actually suffer to them. Their weltanschauung is all that matters to their mortally limited beliefs.

I realize that last paragraph leaves me wide open to the criticisms and judgements of lifeless world leaders whose life purpose it is to destroy life as they profess in lies about saving life, covertly stalking radio hosts looking for a bit o’ sensation to get ratings from, economists in denial of their own bitterness and distrust, and self-delusion made rockstar, zen-master, life coaches jumping out from YouTube like ravenous piranhas tripping out on the latest marketing juice.

Oh well, I’m letting it flow and it feels fucking good. Blame is a thing I struggle with for life too. It feels good to take my power back at times when I realize the blame game has got too out of hand in my head. I just feel repelled by all the pop self-help gurus and their choruses of “take full responsibility for your life” bullshit. I really don’t think they know what they’re talking about as they market their narcissism to other lost souls.

So this piece really does echo some of the shit I want to use for more serious, detailed, more involved, bigger works. Its got paper cutout stuff pasted on the surface. I used pencil shading in some parts. I drew my trademark line drawing, circuit-like doodles over the various surfaces thereafter and then applied water to make the contours bleed.

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July 7, 2022 · 5:10 am

Hearing Candy (original)

I wanted to experiment with a border that looks like the piece is mounted on a board for display. I’ve been feeling annoyed with the borders I’ve been making digitally for my art online. They were intended to look like matting boards of a variety of colors. I’ve just been feeling like they are too cheesy however recently. I may change my mind again about it after posting this recent piece with no e-matting, but a mount on which the piece is fixed.

It looks like there is an Ouroboros that constitutes the light green annulus that occupies the center of interest. I hadn’t intended that effect while I was in the process of making it. I needed to bust out of another rut or block I’ve been in. So this piece is representative of that. There really was no pre-planning or preparation for it, other than the style I’ve been using for the last few years. I just cut out some material from weird fashion magazines after I’d drawn the shapes with pro-markers. I’m still entertaining mixed media concepts, which usually includes markers, pens, pencil, cutouts and simple chemical transformation processes.

I let a lot of things get in the way of my creative actions, and it becomes, not just battles that are swiftly won, but internal wars with my habits, my conflicting desires, and my obsession with politics. This piece looks like a knot in a way, giving some symbolism to my conflicts. I got interested in topological knots a few years ago because of how I realized they represented complex closed loops and how I imagine they characterize psychological compulsions, obsessions, and other self-limiting habits. I wanted to make something creative out of something destructive, and hopefully helpful to others. 

I’ve been reading books by Moshe Feldenkrais, a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist who developed a body awareness and movement training process. I recently finished reading Body & Mature Behavior, a book he wrote after world war two. He discusses the balancing senses as found in the ears, and, more specifically, the semicircular canals. If you pull up a diagram of these structures, you can see that my illustration associates with them. I hadn’t intended this either. 

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April 14, 2022 · 6:00 am

Dvop Your Duo (version 7)

Got science in the corner. The upper right corner. Gee, I wonder why? It’s backwards, too. Surrounded by red. Like a red flag. Anyway, I haven’t posted here for a while. I was in the process of upgrading to a new computer. A much needed necessity for speeding things up. 

This piece is approaching the amalgamator-y hyper-bred-ization I’ve been wanting to execute. So I got some inspiration from contemporary pop artist I googled and discovered—Armand Karpov. He hollows out selections of human figures so that just an empty silhouette is left and then puts a layer of something entirely different under the profile. This is just so fascinating to me, so I thought I’d experiment with that idea here. 

Sometimes I think it’s just too easy slapping these digital images together. Like there should be more work in creating them. I get jealous of Photoshop and how easy it is for this program to just instantly display some of the finest details after adjusting a few filters. This also inspires me as well however in my own traditional creative processes. I also realize that I put in hours and hours of work to make original pieces in traditional media.

This piece works for me because it’s the back of a beautiful woman. Previously, I had wanted to do work with models who have tattoos and do some creative combos with my own abstract style along with material created in collaborations with models. I still plan on doing this, but right now, I immediately was able to spit out this piece after a few processes of selecting parts and pieces of imagery from different files. 

I allow my selecting to be crude so that the randomness can be worked into new synchronous combinations. I draw inspiration from industrial music and punk rock art, as well as pop art in my hybrid amalgamations. The title “Dvop Your Duo” was used as a title for this piece because I found the letters “dvop” and “duo” on a random file off the internet and I liked how it sounded. It sounded like a notetaker writing dvop as a shorthand of “develop.” 

Dvop Your Duo, to me, means developing your second body as Robert Monroe and Robert Bruce describe the non-physical body we all supposedly possess as non-physical beings. Our non-physical natures remain mostly unconscious as we are all wired up to survive life in physical bodies, which require most of our conscious attention. Well, when you meditate, for example, you actually start to develop your second body as you become more aware of it. 

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September 11, 2021 · 5:20 am

One-Way to Another v.2 (original, washed)

Well, Blunty Wunty is at it again. I had to experiment. Things are coming together more nicely in this piece. My subconscious mind is getting a better grasp on approximating and harmonizing mixed media, such as paper cutouts, watercolor, pro markers, pen & ink, and water & alcohol washes. This style that compels me to continue with it is leading me into interesting spaces and ideas. I’m still not satisfied of my own take on impossible shape-scapes. 

I’m trying to convey the sense of multiple timelines or probabilities with the conflicting, angular, arrowheaded lines I weave my pictures with now. It’s like you’re in a dimension above this third dimension in which you can see autonomous little probabilities that you can chute down into if you want to. The setting is on a landscape in the spirit of 20th century surrealist settings. 

I thought of the building as some kind of ore mining machine on another planet. It looked sort of Eastern in earth terms to me however. Like it could be an abstract depiction of a mosque. That round bulbous head, and all. The cutouts are from discarded printouts from my dad’s space game, gardening magazines, and printouts of my own previous artworks I’d posted years ago on social media. 

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February 19, 2021 · 7:02 am

Realization of the Sold I Are (original)

A lot of ideas are coming together in this piece. Both, with my nuanced techniques I’ve developed in my evolution, and also the science fiction philosophy I’ve formed from reading different books over the years. I posted some beginning stages of this piece on Instagram while I was working on it, and, while in an inspired state, some things came together for me as to an explanation—a story—to illuminate such an image. 

I’ve had my own experiences in the dream world that revealed a universe populated with more life than our current official myths propagated by our civilization here on earth. It was just a dream, but it seemed so real to me. So real, in fact, that I found my “self” in another person’s body. Living a life on another planet. I was part of an elite cadre of secret soldiers, sort of like how ninja were trained to be mercenaries in feudal Japan. 

I may have to tell that story for another time because it coincides with so many ideas authors have written about. For example, the test tubes people are born from in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Moreover, I realize what I’m blogging sounds absolutely nuts, and discredits my penchant for truth, but, oh well, I’m a creative person, and I love imagination and creativity.

For this image, I associated what I’d learned from Joe McMoneagle, the US Army remote viewer, and how he described at a MUFON Conference that intelligent life, like ourselves on earth, live in a certain bandwidth of consciousness, and this bandwidth can be identified physically as a certain distance from the center of our galaxy populating the arms circumnavigating around the center. I imagine that higher intelligences operate at higher, less physical frequencies, and they’d be able to function in the higher radiation regions closer to the center of our galaxy. 

I imagined this woman as a person living life on another planet somewhat near our star system. The civilization she lives in is more advanced technologically. But she is human or humanoid. She is an impressionistic vision of the cybernetic human in service to “the singularity” there. She says “unfortunately, the human model, found scattered around on various planets in the galaxy, are stuck in a spiritual, moral, and ethical quandary in which evolution is a loop that spins like a washing machine for higher intelligences as they collect the incredible amounts of wasteful energy that is a byproduct of humans and human activity.”

I titled this piece “Realization of the Sold I Are” because realization is a word used by spiritual gurus, such as Yogananda for “self realization” as a path to enlightenment. I used the words “Sold I Are” because they are disjointed misspellings of the word “soldier.” I imagined her to be a soldier from another world attempting to survive the ordeal of time/space travel. She realizes that our souls are sold into worlds, such as the one we live in, and that our individual selves are not singular, but multiple, thus comprising of multiple probable selves and multiple probable realities as Jane Roberts discussed in her books. 

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January 21, 2021 · 4:39 am

Minnie the Manx Playing with Pranx & Tanx (original)

image 4-27-20 at 10.53 pm

I love absurd, long old titles for artworks. It’s like how The Surrealists did it. Surrealism is a label; it’s a designation; it points the viewer’s mind in a curious direction; it creates a predicament; an irresolvable frustration that is resolved in utter nonsense. But you know that utter nonsense is sense to the unconscious mind, even while the conscious mind abjectly rejects such bafflement.

I’ve come to see smoke used symbolically as prayers, or intense thoughts. The flaming head of this girl is the smoke on the horizon of revolutions to come. The idea of playing with tanks and pranks, along with a ball of something with “God” printed on it denotes the naïveté of playing with life, DNA, spirituality, psychology, technology, religion, deeply held beliefs, youth, the elderly, and on and on and so forth.

We have a new domain of action in life called the internet. We’ve never had this before in our known little chiaroscuro of history crafted for us by our leaders. Many of us are also waking up to previously denied and suppressed psychological and spiritual powers, such as psychic perceptions and so forth. Our potentials are indeed baffling. Yet, the powers that be remain eager to stay on top and retain the illusions, fallacies, and paradigms they’ve always enjoyed without question.

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May 9, 2020 · 2:10 am

Worked Organic Fire v.4

I am revisiting this hybrid digital artwork I made back in 2013. It’s helping me resolve a dilemma with space vs objects. Space, ultimately, is empty. As an artist, you can play with space by creating subtle variations of tone, shade, and color in it. In music, this would be ambience. The space surrounding the objects in this piece are mosaic, but their colors are very similar, thus creating a continuity that space in 2d art mimics. Mosaics are like nonlinear, endless keyed pianos to me. Everything has a tone; everything has a vibration.

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March 4, 2020 · 3:00 am

Your Stonewashed Dubba Dubba (v.1)

Since Instagram is continuing to insist on being a major ____sucker in suppressing me and my art page there, I’m going to post here again like I originally intended. Since Facebook took over Instagram, it has turned from the hottest social media into a basket case bottom dweller. Everyone I show this piece to loves it and says it should sell for thousands in a gallery. Too bad most art galleries are also vampiric ____suckers as well. Thanks for your support, those of you who aren’t fair weather flaky ghosts blown by the wafts of fake social media winds.

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February 11, 2020 · 7:23 am