Artist George J. E. Sakkal breaks down existing pictures to build new ones.
His collage style moves away from what he calls a traditional approach of building on a photograph's image. He focuses instead on cutting a photograph into slices of paper that can be organized by their color, texture and structure.
By doing that, Sakkal said, he has a palette to work with just like oil or watercolor paints.
"It allows me to paint with paper," the Ellicott City artist said.
Sakkal's collages, which incorporate thousands of meticulously placed paper shards into largely abstract works, are on display at the Howard Community College art gallery in Columbia through July 29. The show is a 25-year retrospective of work by Sakkal, who has taught at Columbia Art Center and will start teaching paper collage at the college in the fall.
"The technique is just so incredible," said Jim Adkins, HCC director of visual arts. Adkins said he also enjoys the way the finished products have a look of photorealism and Sakkal's ability to deal with current and historical events through his art.
The works in the exhibit focus on themes ranging from Sakkal's feeling of being trapped in an uninspiring job in New York to his concerns about gridlock, unrest in the Middle East and a U.S. policy of pre-emptive war. More recently, he has made more realistic landscapes and seascapes inspired by his time spent in Maine.
Sakkal was encouraged by his teachers in high school to pursue art, but he said his father wanted a more practical career for him. In the late 1950s, "he wanted me to be an engineer because of Sputnik," he said.
Sakkal compromised and studied architecture at Texas A&M University, but took every elective in fine art he could. After graduation, he worked for five years with the Peace Corps in Iran and used his experiences there to earn a master's degree in city planning from Harvard University.
In the early 1970s, he became an architect for a stock brokerage firm in New York, but he said it did not suit him. He moved to Baltimore and went to work in 1974 for the Maryland Department of Planning, retiring 2 1/2 years ago.
It was not until the 1980s that his professional art career began. A visitor on an architectural tour of his condominium in Coldspring New Town saw a collage he made for his master bedroom and offered to buy it.
