Artist: Philip Luing (staff member)

Medium: Collage using acrylic paint, pen and ink drawings, and India ink on rice paper cut into strips

Artist's comments: I am a staff member who has filled various administrative positions in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences for the past 20 years. I am currently a grants and contracts administrator. I've pursued visual art and creative writing as serious avocations for the past 30 years. This collage incorporates drawings I made during the period of my previous partner Jeff's illness and death. I started doing the drawings as a way of passing time in waiting rooms, then drew them obsessively for a few years after his death as a kind of grief work. I ended up with hundreds of these drawings that had just been sitting around my studio. A few months ago, I came up with the idea of making collage settings for the drawings. I do a background painting with acrylic paint, then use a mixture of acrylic gel and white glue to layer strips of rice paper (on which I've drawn with India ink) under and over the drawings.