"I don’t remember when I started doing collage, I was always aware of it as a medium, though."

"With all the stamps that I handle and especially all the envelopes, I think the first thing I started noticing was all the wonderful array of envelope linings, the patterns on the inside of the envelopes. And through the stamps I would get letters and things that date back fifty or more years from all over the world. The multitude of patterns was fascinating and I started saving those and then it expanded into all kinds of detritus and when I traveled I was fascinated because there are things like Kyrene bus tickets that are absolutely exquisite in and of themselves –beautiful papers and imprinted in a very sort of crude folk art kind of way and they’re very beautiful and covered of course with arabic script. So all of the detritus from when I traveled and all the different people I know that traveled, I would ask them to save their detritus so I have an enormous store of papers and it covers everything from stamps and currency, envelope lining, candy wrappers, tickets, from all over the world, all different periods. And I’m always looking out for paper. I once was at Petimento in San Francisco and there was a beautiful rug that had been woven in SriLanka and it had the most glorious tag on the bottom on in Senegalese and I went through the whole charade of holding it up and talking about how beautiful it was while I frantically pulled the label off the bottom of it so I could have it for my collage work (laughs)... I’m always peeling off nice foreign beer labels and things like that to use."

"I love the collage; it started out I think in the 70‘s and I would combine it with painting, and then just introduce a few collage elements, then paint on it and then it just developed into pure collage; it’s like painting with paper - I approach it exactly the same way."

"Of course it's played a big part in the artistamps because most of the stamps, the vignettes, are collages. Even though E. F. Higgens of Doo Dah Post writes me and tells me I really should stop all those boring collages and put my paintings on the stamps"…..(laughs) - Harley