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| George J.E. Sakkal |
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| In 1912 the French artist, George Braque, created the first fine art paper collage. Braque's accomplishment ushered in a new era in art. The paper collage changed forever the regard for the use of the traditional paint/brush stroke process as the means to produce art. Fifty years later in 1962, with the creation of his first collage, George Sakkal demonstrated that paper could be applied to appear as paint to create art equivalent to the paint/brush stroke process, thus furthering the use of paper as a fine art medium.
In the seventeen years that followed (1962 - 79) Sakkal performed extensive experiments with the use of paper. From the results of these experiments he discovered that paper offered unlimited possibilities for the creation of art. He concluded that for most of the 20th century, paper, at best, had been minimally understood, appreciated and utilized as an art medium. He observed that most collagists who used magazine photographs as their paper source overlooked paper’s inherent properties. These properties, flat color, color with texture and color with structure, he discovered, could each be isolated and broken out from the original photo into small parts and pieces to create a paper palette. A palette formed from numerous photos into a multitude of paper parts, could then be reassembled and used like paint to create a new form of paper collage. This technique revolutionized the way paper acquired from photographic sources is perceived as an art medium. Through the results of his early experiments and the subsequent application of these findings applied to his art work, Sakkal creates a unique, painterly form of collage, that is intensely complex, visually vibrant, and highly explosive... art that he describes as Maximism.
Sakkal was a gallery artist with Komei Wachi’s Gallery K in Washington D.C. Wachi believed Sakkal had made significant advances in the use of paper as a fine art medium. In support of this contention, he exhibited Sakkal’s work along side the collages of Robert Rauschenberg and "Jess" Collins. Wachi believed it was not a question of whether Sakkal would achieve national recognition for his contribution to the medium, but when.
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