Joe Rudko.

Seattle artist Joe Rudko’s studio is filled with pieces of other people’s stories. Located in the SoDo neighborhood above a bakery in a 1910-era building, the space holds thousands of family photographs donated by the boxful by people he knows who have cleaned out an attic or storage space. Some have even been mailed to him by strangers. The images are the raw material for his graphic, colorful works. He jokingly compares himself to a recycling center, noting that he “rarely throws anything away.”

Working under his studio’s skylight, the Emerald City native uses utility knives, scissors, rulers and mats to cut the images into block-like pieces. He then sorts them by color before reassembling them into large collages atop sheets of adhesive-coated watercolor paper affixed to his studio wall. This means that, for his larger pieces, he often finds himself scaling a ladder to finish. 

Rudko works primarily on vertical surfaces when assembling his collages.

Rudko works primarily on vertical surfaces when assembling his collages.

Rudko's pieces are composed of cut-up found photographs.

Rudko's pieces are composed of cut-up found photographs.

Works including Heirloom for Elfvring hang in Rudko’s Seattle studio.

Works including Heirloom for Elfvring hang in Rudko’s Seattle studio.

Rudko uses both the colorful front and the white backsides of photographs, which sometimes include handwritten dates. With his latest series, “Heirlooms,” the artist collaborates directly with his clients. “They send me their pictures and I send them back as collages,” he says. “They see their family memories in a whole new context.”

It’s an artistic process with roots in his childhood. Rudko began making paintings and drawings based on images in the National Geographic magazines his grandmother gifted him. As a teen, he became an avid photographer and started collecting decades- and even century-old snapshots from secondhand stores. Later, as a student at Western Washington University, the artist exhibited a series that used graphite, colored pencil, spotting pen and photographic ink to manipulate vintage photos. 

Today, his artwork involves arranging the small pieces of photographs into both geometric and sinuous forms. “There’s an organic process of putting one piece down and following that thread, working intuitively until the whole thing is complete,” Rudko explains. “Because I’m laying them on adhesive, there’s no take two. These works are all first attempts.”

Rudko, represented by PDX Contemporary Art, will be showing at the Seattle Art Fair in late July. “It’s fun when people think my works are digital or paintings from a distance,” he says. “Then, as they approach it, they see a hand or a smirk on someone’s face and the whole thing snaps into focus: ‘Oh, this isn’t what I thought it was.’ There are details they can relate to that bring up their own stories.” 

PHOTOS: AMOS MORGAN