Video producer assembles second career as collage artist

Amid the painful recovery haze from double jaw surgery, a career in collage art was born for Deborah Shapiro. As she thumbed through magazines, which Shapiro admits she had a difficult time reading due to the pain medication-induced cloudiness, she focused instead on the color palette of the pages, and thought about their potential transformation into something completely different. Much like a painter who takes careful steps to select hues, Shapiro chooses magazine clips and pages with an eye toward the colors of her final composition. And the finished pieces become something entirely different than their print forebears, like a fox, goldfish, or a woman holding a cup of coffee and a cigarette, with her legs crossed (coyly named, “Three Bad Habits”). From a distance, her pieces look like paintings, transcending their cut-and-paste medium. “There’s almost like two personalities to my artwork,” she says. “From a distance, you see one object, but when you get up close, there’s so much else going on.” Words, phrases and smaller images often are woven into the collages. Common themes are wildlife and nature, along with femininity. She recognizes there also are a lot of watches in her work, which could be attributed to the preponderance of watch advertisements in magazines, or maybe a hidden meaning about time. Most of her career has been focused on running a video production company. But she would like to settle in to more of an art career in upcoming years. She plans to segue the business and marketing skills needed to run a business into her art career. For more about her work, visit http://www.deborahshapiroart.com. Visit the Akronist at http://www.akronist.com for more on this and other stories.