Every work of art starts as an idea, invisible to everyone but the maker. Here’s how one of my digital collages takes form:
Figures are found and sourced online. Twelve separate images, gathered with no relationship to each other yet — the Jupiter 2 from the classic television show “Lost in Space,” a full moon in seven colors for seven seasons, a purple finch, a set of pillows, a black swan, two gay men in a kiss. Raw material, still just separate objects, unrelated to each other.
The figures are aligned with a conceptual understanding of what part each will play within the composition. This is the artist as the screenwriter. Before anything gets placed, it gets meaning. Each piece is assigned a role — danger, freedom, longing, grace — so that by the time the collage is built, every object already knows what role it’s playing.
Note: every figure is planned, with a purpose and understanding.
A background image is selected as a surface, this time, is my own ceiling. A photograph of the room I live in becomes the sky the collage with fall under.
The figures are arranged, in this instance, the artist is a director, planning how the figures move or stand, their entrances and exits within the frame.
Lastly, the collage aesthetic is shaped, in this instance, the artist is a production designer, identifying color saturation, value range, point of focus, overall visual variety and cohesion:
Space: how much air sits between each moon, so nothing crowds and nothing floats untethered.
Color: open palette with a rainbow of hues, fully saturated, each with varying intensity.
Value: the ceiling’s warm gradient against the cooler tones of blue, teal, and purple, so the piece has depth instead of flatness.
Balance: the two men anchored bottom right, heavy enough to hold the weight of everything scattered above them. The asymmetry creates an image in motion.
Scale: nothing here is actually to scale with anything else, which is the point — mythology doesn’t obey physics.
This is a behind the scenes look at how the collage comes together from inspiration to presentation.
All the World | The Gay Gaze | The Subdivision | Digital Photocollage | 2026 | James Behan
With this work, we focus on two men in an embrace, an expression of romantic love with a kiss. Around them circles all the worlds, ones of support, ones of concerns. The two men in their own world surrounded by an avalanche of views about their love for one another. In this scene arrives the Jupiter 3 as witness, the truth teller, also present the black swan and purple finch, two elements of nature the speak of the nature of gay love as purposeful and noble. Lastly, the set of pillows, as an expression of hope for a soft landing for this couple, to be supported and encouraged in their relationship to one another.
— Behan
