Collage artist Wayne Berube reads only newspapers and the Bible.
"The Bible is certainly a source of inspiration for my pieces," he said. "If I live long enough, I'd love to collage and recreate sections of the Bible. I get so distracted by pop culture - that's the newspaper side."
He said artists from the past drew inspiration from the Good Book.
"The Bible is so unexplored by artists of this generation," Berube said. "Every artist does his little Christ on the cross, maybe, and then beyond that, they run out of inspiration. A lot of times, it's an irreverent Christ on the cross, too. And there's the elephant-dung Madonna."
Berube said he has been an artist for almost two years. But he has been a staple for UNM's art students for the past eight years, cutting mats and frames. He ran Art Bar Gallery on Monte Vista Boulevard but recently moved his business to 115 California St. N.E.
"I cut tons of mats for UNM art students," he said. "They have art projects and they come in, so I do that for all y'all's students. I like being over here because I have more space, but I miss the UNM area."
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
He also sells mid-century lithograph prints, mainly from Israel, France, Italy and New York. He also has some pieces from the Tamarind Institute, one from a girl named Marilee.
"It's a stone litho," he said. "It's a great print. She broke the stone making that print, so they were all upset with her. They're irreplaceable. If you're going to break the stone, you better get a good print out of it."
He said he sells handmade art.
"I don't do posters or anything that's machine-made," he said. "I'm into real art. Giclée laser prints - it's not real art."
You don't need formal training to make collages, he said.
"It's a low-brow art form," Berube said. "It's just like a slugfest with you and the pages out of the magazines. You just take these glossy, beautiful images, and you start chopping them up and moving them and placing them, and you create the tension - but happiness, too. That's my two-pronged approach. I want happy pieces that are tense. There's not a lot of happy, fun pieces out there."
He uses celebrities in place of royalty, religious icons and regular folk.
He has a piece called "The Queen Encourages the Princess to Launch the Fleet."
"There's a tension when you put Britney Spears over the queen of England," he said.
"It doesn't quite fit, but it doesn't not fit, in this case. It's totally out of context."
Berube hates the word juxtapose.
"It's the overused j-word," he said. "All I can say is, it's like putting stuff in a blender and pressing 'on.' Then you taste it, and it either tastes good or it doesn't. It's like smoothie art."
Spears appears over and over in his pieces.
"See, Britney just goes with everybody," Berube said. "The camera loves her. I've worked with her many times. She's a beautiful disaster."
