Jay Tomlinson is a Kansas City collage artist whose work draws on ephemera he has gathered over many years: printed scraps, labels, papers, and fragments that most people would pass over. He came to collage after a long career as an architect, and that training shows in his eye for composition, proportion, and the quiet tension between parts.

His work is about finding beauty through abstraction. Stripped of its original purpose, a torn ticket or a faded page becomes pure color, texture, and line, and in new arrangements it can become something unexpectedly beautiful. Jay is fascinated by how fine that line is: a single fragment moved an inch can tip a composition from noise into grace, or back again. Each piece is an exploration of where that threshold lies.

His work has been included in the Flat Files exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute.

For Patty Smith