Collage Man
Rip it to shreds: Top interior designer does something mind-blowingly different
Perhaps most widely known for the celebrated interiors he created with legendary deceased Houston designer Herbert Wells, Jerry Jeanmard has been a pillar inside the city's design scene for more than four decades — first as an illustrator and graphic designer before dedicating himself to interior design in the mid 1980s.
But since Wells' death in late 2010, Jeanmard has shifted his focus back to two dimensions, producing an impressive range of collage work that hearkens back to his early career in advertising. A selection of recent material is on view at the Moody Gallery through early January.
"I'd been collecting different pieces for years, knowing I'd do something with it all eventually . . . I just wasn't sure what, exactly."
"I always loved paper and, in my professional life, I come across a lot of interesting patterns and colors," he tells CultureMap.
"I'd been collecting different pieces for years, knowing I'd do something with it all eventually . . . I just wasn't sure what, exactly."
Jeanmard says he first turned to collage a half decade ago as a sort of outlet from the rigid world of design, with its careful measurements, straight lines and hours of prep work.
"I've always been drawn to working with cut paper. I think it's the randomness of the process, which is not something you get so much with design," he says. "I'm generally a very controlled person when I work. But these collages, I can just start without any preconceived ideas."
The artist-designer fuses together a range of forgotten paper materials — using anything from ripped postmarked envelopes and faded construction paper to wrinkled tarot cards and valet tickets. The resulting forms, which typically measure about a foot in diameter, are glued onto a solid white background.
"There's both order and disorder in these works," Jeanmard says. "I tend to put the random pieces together very quickly, but they end up very self contained and organized in a way. They also don't bleed off the edges of the paper, which I must have gotten from my days as a graphic designer."
Jerry Jeanmard: Collages runs through Jan. 5 at Moody Gallery.