"My core practice is large scale site-specific wall painting with related works on paper and canvas. The work is a synthesis of three distinct practices: comics, collage, and muralism (both traditional and spray can). The superhero comics of the sixties and seventies were my first aesthetic training ground. As a fan, collector and wannabe pro-cartoonist I became conversant with the extraordinarily dynamic and seductive vocabulary of ink line rendering techniques developed by a group of brilliant, mostly working-class, mid-century cartoonists including Wallace Wood, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, and the towering figure of Jack Kirby, whose exaggeration and abstraction of the human form paved the way for the deeply fetishistic superhero comics drawn by a later generation in the ‘90s. It was in these decadent late comics, first published by Image and drawn by Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Jae Lee, Todd MacFarlane, and others, that I recognized an erotic flowering of the sublimated passions of superhero fandom. The old moral universe had disappeared, along with the old human body, along with the old well-crafted narrative. Only the obsessively detailed depiction of power, terror, and physical extremity remained. The comics, no longer a mass culture disposable, but now increasingly sold only in specialty shops effectively identical to adult bookstores, had become a Bataillean pleasure kingdom. The San Francisco punk and art school scenes of the 80s were host to a wide range of collage practices in literature, film, music, and visual art. The cut-up texts of beat writer William Burroughs were ubiquitous and influential, as were the found-footage films and collages of local artists Bruce Conner and Jess, the Situationist theory of detournement (freshly translated by Ken Knabb in Berkeley), and the work of dozens of younger artists, including Winston Smith, Julie Murray, Craig Baldwin, Negativland, and Scott Williams. Important east coast collage artists passed through to teach, work or perform including Kathy Acker, Brian Eno, and Grandmaster Flash. Happening on a picture of an old Lettrist collage made by lifting bits of newsprint off with adhesive tape, I adopted that medium and worked in it for years, attempting to emulate Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s occult literary practices in visual form. In the ’90s, following my populist inclinations, I co-founded a community-based mural project in SF’s Mission district with Rigo23 and others. As an administrator and later as a muralist I had an intimate view of the entire range of public painting practices in one of muralism’s historic centers at a time when a synthesis of graffiti and high art practice was redefining the field. Significant figures here include Rigo, Barry McGee, Alicia McCarthy, Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Andrew Schoultz, and others. I was struck by graffiti's hermetic panache, its secret language, and its abandonment of the architectural frame: the way certain throw-ups seemed to float free of the wall, making no claim on it, in marked contrast to the traditional murals which employed an accessible visual vocabulary and treated the wall as a picture plane to be filled up. Unwilling to abandon the painterly ambition of older muralists like Chuy Campusano, Dewey Crumpler, and Ray Patlan however, I sought a mode that would combine interesting aspects of both. In the year 2000, aged 39, after about thirty years of experimentation in various media, I found my practice painting walls with designs derived from collaged comic book fragments. I think of the process as alchemical. The rendering of the base printed matter is fairly tedious, a matter of cutting away dull narrative and figurative bric-a-brac. The eyes tire, the blade grows dull, but the pile of interesting, possibly useful fragments is replenished. The reconfiguration that follows is unpredictable and mysterious. Shuffle, scan, rotate, adjust—over and over, searching for hints of the new form. Faculties of taste, faith, daring, and persistence are called upon. Usually, it takes three days. The final transmutation is physically demanding: the fragile paper plan raised to architectural scale; the sordid action figures remixed as weightless metallic abstraction, the dark energies of adolescence purified and fulfilled in serene post-human ecstasy." - Aaron Noble