Hi — it’s David! Thanks for exploring my art zone — thought I would offer a few words of my journey with my own voice.
I am a lifelong humanist & art lover. After I graduated from Grinnell College with a degree in Russian Language & Linguistics, I spent many years as a travelling musician. Music also afforded me an outlet & audience for art. I started to collage regularly as a way to make concert posters.
Some years back I decided to focus primarily on my collage art practice. I could apply lessons from music & painting to collage — a experimental D.I.Y. ethos animated by spirit of play — while also growing more ambitious in scale. I would dare to try new structures & ideas with my medium. I would dare to manifest the strange images toward which I felt compelled.
It is a fun hunt to seek & find the images. It is joyful to intuitively listen to my feelings as I scan through photography — I will immediately know when I have found what I am looking for. I will search frantically through mountains of paper — I will choose exactly which fragments to drag into the light & give meaning & life in new context.
Some of my art is pastoral — nature landscapes which evoke feelings of being in a natural environment. That is the calm of the deep greens, the veins of the leaf, the vast particular geometries of organic structure. There is truth to this feeling — even though the collage composite is obviously contrived (“not natural”). The artificial collage is not trying to replicate nature, but to reveal it by abstracting it.
Some of my art is inspired by the city — trying to convey the complex mythic feelings and mystery of city spaces. I lead history walking tours in Chicago, & so take great delight in re-mixing the geometry of that city in particular. Many of my pieces feature collage photography of Chicago or Illinois.
In the future I look forward to 2026 exhibitions & continuing to make & share art prints of my work. Email me at davelineal@gmail.com
THANK YOU FOR YOUR AMAZING ATTENTION !
Based in Chicago, Illinois, David Lineal is a contemporary paper collage artist specializing in evocative semi-abstract imagery and liminal landscapes. He searches through & culls his paper images from old books and discarded ephemera — curating fragments of light, color, & form. Lineal re-orders the paper pieces, locks with scissors & glue, & creates both a new assemblage image & also a textural art object. The disparate fragments fuse together to pleasantly mystify the viewer with a new order.
Collage Art by Lineal 