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“You just have that moment when you realize what you want to do, and when you start actually doing it, it begins to inform everything else,”

says Brandon Spence about the art of collage, one that fell into his lap partly out of happenstance, partly out of necessity. After leaving the New Hampshire Institute of Art (where he spent two years), Spence found a shocking lack of access to printing presses or thousand-dollar equipment, but magazines aplenty. He’s a master of Fiskars and Elmer’s, and he’s got stacks upon stacks of mid-twentieth century issues of Good Housekeeping, The Farmer’s Journal, and National Geographic. Spence likes a good hunt for the right clip, but he’s not averse to letting the images do most of the work.

Most of Spence’s work of late has been influenced by conversations he’s had with a friend about existential philosophy or the various theories on earth’s origin; his friend is a theist, Spence an atheist. “It’s really an exercise for the brain. A lot of my collages take place in an alternate sort of dimension of space time where the universe is in some sort of flux—it’s either collapsing or expanding.”

“A big problem I always had was with concept. I find that if I go to draw or paint without a concept in mind or something I know I want to do, the blank canvas is that much more intimidating because I have no idea where to start. If I have stacks of reference images and I just start cutting, the ideas come a little more organically, and the ideas finally gel and take shape.”