This is a new version of a digital collage I made in 1994 or '95 (that version can be seen in the "Early Collage" gallery linked to on the right side of this page.) The collage is based on a Peter Paul Rubens/Jan Wildens oil painting from 1618 - "The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus" (Wildens did the background). The painting depicts a mythological Greek scene in which Castor and Pollux abduct Phoebe and Hilaeira, who are daughters of Leucippus of Messenia.
1994 was still the early days of digital imaging, and I was amazed at how Photoshop allowed me to work directly with scanned images and scale or rotate them as needed to fit into a collage. I decided to try a "Ship of Theseus" strategy, where I'd replace each major element of an oil painting with some other chunk of image that resembled or was analogous to it -- which I'd find by rifling through books and magazines (this was pre-internet).
I worked without much in the way of preconceived goals - my idea was really to see what sort of accidental changes and disjunctions would creep into the old painting as I gradually pasted in replacement parts: "here's a comic book drawing of a horse in a similar pose", "here's a Roman centurion illustration from the 60's that would work for Castor's head", "here’s a nude woman in a girlie magazine striking a similar pose to one of the daughters," etc.
When I was almost finished I was struck by the reality that none of my changes had really affected the now-highly-problematic “meaning” of the Rubens piece. So, to avoid looking too complicit (always a risk for male artists trying to be ironic and postmodern) I replaced Pollux with a sci-fi superhero from an old pulp magazine cover — saving the damsels and “Preventing the Rape.”