Doren Robbins, Fusing the Dream with Mixed-Media Works

Doren Robbins is a poet, essayist, and mixed media artist. His writings have appeared in Kayak, Sulfur, Third Rail, andmany other journals. Summer 2021 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Sympathetic Manifesto, Selected Poems, 1975-2015.

My work is connected to the originating DADA and Surrealist traditionsof fusing the dream into works of fine art,collage, photomontage, and mixed-media works, many of which are discussed in artist-and-subject-specific exhibits and catalogues of exhibitions, Herta Wescher’s book Collage, Robert Motherwell’s The DADA Painters and Poets, and Marjorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment.

In part, to me the fantasy is in the euphoria of arrangement and the directing emotion. Something must be present in the images, something like what Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca referred to as Duende, an incident of imagination, a type of imponderable intensity.

Over the last fifteen years collages and mixed-media works…