I am a practitioner of the Bricolage Arts, a folk model of universal creativity utilizing whatever is at hand to fashion, repair, and invent. I have used a “Bricolage Theory of Improvisational Composition” in some form all my life. I learned naïve Bricolage by being born into a Mexican-American migrant fieldworking family. We fixed everything with broken parts and pieces of other things. We made tools from discards and scraps. Poverty made us inventive. Labor-saving ideas were quickly passed along and copied, anything to make work easier. Naïve Bricolage (also called “crude materialism”) always breaks down because life for “the poor” also always breaks down. In this world of constant breakage, repairs are transitory, made for the moment only. We fenced in pigs with cleverly matched, but abruptly patched-together broken boards and wire, a hasty pastiche for the day; tomorrow we would chase the pigs again.  When we searched in the waste dumps, we celebrated the “magical” Bricolage find. Since necessity made us see value in everything broken, we could look past and through the wreckage of all broken pieces to find a whole piece, one part intact. It felt like magic, like a conjuration.

FIRST-GENERATION BRICOLAGE, 1971-1984

Without a high-school diploma until I was 30, I was a roustabout, drawing and giving away (occasionally selling) colorful semi-abstractions while following unskilled labor from Texas to California and north to Oregon. I began to consciously study the Bricolage Arts while earning a BA in Studio Art (with honors) in 1971 from the University of California-Santa Barbara at the age of 33. I already knew that folk creativity was about improvisation and its magical experience (“sudden appearance” usually referred to as “emergence”). The University experience helped me realize that the Bricolage Arts differed—more modest, yet more enduring—from what I was being taught in the institution. I thus embraced Postmodernism and its paths of idiosyncratic development, hoping they would lead to realizing my own Bricolage way of thinking and working.

But I was a family man with two children. Providing for the family was my highest priority. I worked in manufacturing as a line supervisor and studied Bricolage in my spare time. I began to evolve a set of skills in which the quickness of the transitory and the permanence of the structural fused into an image. I integrated Graffiti Art materials, such as spray enamels, to intensify “quickness.” I used nontraditional surfaces and materials by necessity, taking an Outsider Art perspective on the Bricolage. I occasionally painted on “found” canvases, but primarily worked on anything lying around as I experimented with the limits of “making do” with “whatever is at hand.”

In order to improve my long-term employment prospects, I earned a master’s in Counseling in 1979; and in 1980, enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California, supported by a 5-year UC Minority Fellowship. The doctoral program was difficult since my educational background was poor and spotty; essentially what migrant students get as their education. For example, to make up for my poor education, I studied Inferential Statistics by reading across four textbooks lying open on my table, beginning with Elementary Algebra, followed by Intermediate Algebra, adding College Algebra, and finally Inferential Statistics to arrive at my assignments.

I also found I couldn’t grasp “Theory” or the nature of “Abstraction” using academic tools. They weren’t sensible to me. I began to realize the concreteness of Bricolage thinking, a concreteness demanded by its principles of utility and inclusivity. I decided to apply the inventiveness I learned from a lifetime of Naïve Bricolage to my university studies. When the abstract nature of what I was studying began to elude my thinking, I would stop, turn to a large sheet of drawing paper, and using my large, varied collection of drawing materials, I would intuitively draw until an abstract composition emerged. I would put the drawing up on my wall, return to my academic study, and when its abstractions began to elude me, I looked at the drawing again and allowed its composition to organize my thoughts. I wrote my research dissertation in this way: drawing on the compositional power of Naïve Bricolage to integrate my concrete, aesthetic thinking with academic logical ordering.

On Friday, May 24, 1984, I defended my dissertation, and the following day, Saturday, May 25, I opened a two-artist show at the Eaton Gallery in downtown Santa Barbara. I hung 30 pieces (study drawings and paintings) from the works that I had produced while simultaneously working on my doctoral program. I call this work “First-Generation Bricolage.”

Over the next 12 years, I was to lose my entire body of work three times. My first loss came by dislocation in 1984 upon graduation from my doctoral program. I left the University unemployed, short of funds, and hauling my family, now five, out of state to New Mexico. We carried everything we owned in a van and a rented trailer. There was no room for art. I sold and gave away everything I could and then we declared an “open house” and invited the community to take whatever they wanted. Like ants, they carried away everything. In reality, I kept two canvas pieces, but these were lost as I moved with my family eight times in six years, six moves of which were interstate relocations seeking work (CA-NM-CO-VT-OH-AZ).

SECOND-GENERATION BRICOLAGE, 1984-1992

While living in Colorado Springs (1987-1989), I hung 15 new Bricolage pieces in the city’s main Training Center. I was severely strapped for money and was working with anything, including scrap Styrofoam etched with spray enamels. Three of my pieces were selected in a juried show for the 1988 inauguration of the Business of Art Center in the Manitou district of Colorado Springs. I was also teaching Social and Behavioral Sciences part-time and this led to a graduate-level teaching job at Vermont College. Two years later, 1989, I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to work as an Assistant Academic Dean on The Union Institute’s Ph.D. program and, by so doing, greatly improved my financial situation. It became increasingly difficult to find time for art due to the demands of changing jobs and relocations. Yet despite losing pieces along the way, I accumulated 30 new Bricolages and continued to work on a Bricolage Theory of Improvisational Composition in my spare time.

The second loss of my body of work—which I called Graffiti Art and Junk Art since I used spray-can techniques and salvaged whatever the environment afforded—came as a result of my divorce in 1992. After moving to Tucson, Arizona, and still a full-time faculty member for The Union Institute, my wife and I separated. I moved to Philadelphia and left all my work in Tucson with the intent of finding storage, but all my work was lost during the divorce. I had to start over again, but I now understood how and why Outsider Art values inversion, and in doing so, unearths creativity and innovation. I call this destroyed body of work (of which I have a home videotape) “Second-Generation Bricolage.”

THIRD-GENERATION BRICOLAGE, 1993-1997

The third total loss of my work, created in the following four years while living in Philadelphia, occurred in an early morning house fire in December 1997. I had created 44 new pieces of Bricolage in an array of distinctly different improvisational compositions. I had recognized that originality is built into the Bricolage improvisational process and that each piece would be different even though the process is the same each time. I was planning a showing of this work. During the fire, my wife and I escaped injury via an outside stairway, but the house and its contents, including my archives, photos, and slides, were a loss. It was small consolation, but the insurance paid me $25,000 for my lost artwork.

FOURTH-GENERATION BRICOLAGE, 1998-2004

In 1998, I began yet another “new” cycle, but this time with adequate supplies and equipment. Since then, I have accumulated over 120 pieces of what I call “Fourth-Generation Bricolage.” During a 1999-2000 academic sabbatical, I tested my Bricolage Theory of Improvisational Composition by creating 46 small to large pieces in 6 weeks while designing the décor of a new gourmet vegan restaurant called Horizons Café (see Improvisation button). Of those Bricolage pieces, 28 were hung in Horizons Café, 12 have been sold and replaced, 4 original pieces were commissioned; and as the Café’s décor evolved from Southwestern and Mediterranean style to a tropical ambiance, all restaurant reviews praised the artwork while praising the gourmet cuisine. I finished developing the Bricolage Theory of Improvisational Composition in an academic paper on this work (“A Bricolage Demonstration Project”) by formulating the “three least-cause principles of environmental motility” (Least Resistance, Least Action, Least Effort). These three-action principles explain and guide the dynamics of Bricolaging as an activity of improvisational production.

FIFTH GENERATION BRICOLAGE, 2005-?

I am now ready to begin the Fifth-Generation Bricolage. The path from Naïve Bricolage to Fifth-Generation Bricolage comes full circle. The shamanic element of Bricolage (creatio ex nihilo –something from nothing) is what Fifth-Generation Bricolage seeks to realize. In the terminology of improvisation, I seek the elimination of the temporal gap between impulse and articulation so that “what is done is what is.”