[bass, drums, synthesizer and strings play in bright rhythm] (Colin Johnson) I remember going into museums when I was a kid and I would see like, minimalism, and it never did anything for me because I didn't see it as being hugely different than the wall next to it.

My work is maximalism; I mean it's like the exact opposite.

I always love coming back to pieces by other artists that contain so much detail that every time you look at it, it sort of recaptures your imagination and you see something that you perhaps hadn't seen before.

And I hope that my work does that too.

I think in general I'm just drawn to detail.

I've sent pieces off to gallery shows and got them back again and just kept working on 'em, so you know, that might be, that might be a sickness, I don't know.

I was an illustration major, and after graduation, I became a freelance illustrator.

I worked with a pretty good cross section of all the major magazines, "Better Homes and Gardens," "US News and World Report," and "Newsweek," you know, pretty much all the major magazines, 'cause I've been doing this close to 20 years now.

A lot of it at this point in time, in terms of the illustration work, is pretty much straight painting, as opposed to my personal work, which is heavily collage-based.

I've only done one collage piece for a magazine client, and that was for "Smithsonian" last year.

Typically, the magazine clients don't have that kind of time to give you.

Like an 8 x 10 piece would take me like a month to do.

But "The Smithsonian" wasn't very big; it was about 4 x 5 inches, and they gave me plenty of time and I think the overall result turned out great.

As far as my personal work goes, you know, I can do anything I want to do.

This is a big sort of 40-by-60-inch piece that I started a while back.

It basically starts where I'm just painting in like big blocks of color to give a lot of color to the piece, but then to also start building the collage into the background color.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I think actually the most fun is the fact that I have to like go on a scavenger hunt to find all this stuff.

These are like old Valentine's Day cards.

These are both old pieces of packaging.

This is like an old tobacco card.

As many different sorts of things as I can possibly get into the piece without kinda repeating anything.

And actually, now that I'm sorta filling in some of these gaps, the pieces will tend to become smaller and smaller as I go along.

To sit down with an X-Acto knife and cut it out each individual little piece, that takes a pretty long time to do in order to build up a wealth of material.

It can take me days sometimes just to fill one of these things enough so that I have enough material in order to start gluing.

There is sort of like a filling process with this type of work where you have to get to a certain point and bring the elements close enough together where there can then be like relationships that you can play with-- more of like a conversation going on in terms of the way that the different elements are communicating with one another.

Actually the work, even though I refer to it as collage for lack of a better term, it's actually pretty much 50% collage and 50% painting.

Even though it started as straight-up collage pieces, I've actually branched out and started doing the collage as actual characters that are moving through a landscape and interacting with characters that I've actually hand-painted.

The straight-up painted characters are characters that have a lot of nature-related stuff going on, where the collage characters are supposed to be indicative of humankind sort of spilling all this stuff all over the nature.

So there is a definite man-nature duality to the newer work that I'm excited about.

I like all the parts of the process of doing the collage.

Sometimes I get impatient because it takes so long, but I have to remind myself that it's, it's a marathon and not a sprint, and I have to just come in every day to the studio and take one day at a time and do as much as I can.

I really don't know how to define what I do.

I've heard it defined in a lot of different ways-- "pop surrealism;" or at one point I think all the artists who were doing work in a sort of similar vein to what I'm doing, were referred to as "lowbrow," which nobody seemed to like.

I tend to leave that to other people, because I have like 80,000 little pieces to glue, so I don't have the time to try and figure what, you know, what the work is.

(men and women) ♪ Bossa nova eyes ♪