I worked at a restaurant named Eulipia in San Jose, California from 1981-1994 while I was going to graduate school and starting out as a college art instructor. I finally left when I moved to Tulsa to start a new career in Interactive Design.
This collage was a result of a photo shoot with three of my co-workers from the restaurant. We did the shoot in one of their backyards while they were sunbathing on a hot summer day. I had been creating a series of collages that used body part close ups combined with sky or other neutral colored backgrounds.
This collage resulted from having all the photos on my drawing board which was a large door actually attached to two drawing board bases. As I laid them out I started seeing a flow to the images. I originally had only one row, with the body below and the sky above. At that point it seemed like a landscape. But I had a lot of photos from the shoot and I laid out a second row to see if those photos might have a different rhythm and flow to them.
I got the idea to turn the top row over and the blue matched up and became a river in my mind. Then it was just a matter of finding the right place for each photo so the flow of the river was pleasing to my eye.