DATE: Thursday, September 4, 1997           TAG: 9709040079

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   91 lines

COLLAGE ARTISIT'S WORK RANGES FROM SPIRITUAL TO SPINE-TINGLING

A UNIVERSE of miracles would be meaningless to supernatural collage artist David Vann if he couldn't share it with others through his art.

The 25-year-old Norfolk man clips print images that strike his fancy, then arranges them so that they speak to both the hellish and the heavenly. The act of creation is largely unconscious; and only when the cutting and pasting are complete does the former punk rocker toss his long blond locks over his shoulders and pause to consider which of God's wonders the work depicts.

Fourteen of Vann's often-spine-chilling, sometimes-spiritual collages will be exhibited throughout this month at the Hope House Foundation Thrift Shop, 1900 Mon ticello Ave., in Norfolk. An artist reception for the exhibit, titled ``Interventions,'' will be held at 5 p.m. today at the shop. Twenty percent of the sales of Vann's work will go to the foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides support services to people with developmental disabilities.

Vann's artistic eye and his appreciation of the horrific and supernatural netted him a job as set dresser for the 22 episodes of the fall television series ``Ghost Stories,'' now being produced by New Dominion Pictures in Virginia Beach. He was working as a plasterer and applied for a job on impulse this May. He started out as a driver, but it didn't take long for producers to recognize his eye for design.

Often, Vann's collages juxtapose images of the stuff of nightmares.

When he re-created hell in the collage titled ``Moments,'' Vann was drawn to images of cold mechanical steel and bolts of white lightning slicing through a blood-red sky that mirrors the hues in the river of fire.

The imagery is dark, and a pitted metal face in the upper left quadrant of the collage sheds its hard, cold surface in strips. But Vann, in many ways a realist, asks, ``hasn't every person felt that way?''

When he wished to speak of heaven, the young artist positioned two books and two intertwined rings atop a carved-wood image of Christ on the cross to say that there is more than one way to approach the divine.

``A lot of people walk around with high and mighty ideas about Christ,'' said Vann, pointing out clothesline sheets flapping across the blue sky behind the sacrificed son of God. The mundane items of the world emphasize the ordinariness of the scene. He spotted the sheets in a photograph of a New York City alleyway.

The piece is titled ``Correlations,'' and it is the parallel nature - the connectedness - of the things of this world that have mesmerized Vann since childhood.

David Vann recalls watching ``wall-to-wall horror movies,'' then plastering the wall of his bedroom with posters of the same films. In his young mind, he imagined himself the next Stephen King.

But King's influence on Vann is second only to that of illustrator, novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. Others who have affected his work greatly include Edgar Allan Poe and Ray Bradbury.

Vann recites a lengthy Bradbury poem by heart. He also has aspirations of writing and filmmaking.

On the shelves of his third-story Ghent walk-up are thick volumes on Rembrandt, Leonardo Da Vinci and other artists.

Vann dropped out of the ninth grade in Virginia Beach and became a self-described punk rocker. But he eventually returned to school and graduated at age 21, the oldest student in his class. He spent a year at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. He says he went into a funk for a few years after a failed relationship. Eventually, he got a job as a plasterer, but there was little outlet for his creativity.

Vann comes from a family with artistic interests.

His mother, Linda Elliot, teaches art at the John B. Dey Elementary School in Virginia Beach. His stepmother, Jenny Windsor, is a well-known landscape artist. David's father is Robert Vann of Virginia Beach, a stockbroker.

The young artist takes another collage from his portfolio and explains that it is symbolic of old age and its focus on the past. In ``A Place in the Past,'' Vann stations a cartoonish elderly man in the midst of chaos - a tangle of bare brown branches and, again, bolts of lightning. But the man appears to stare melancholic through a porthole into an idyllic country-lane scene from the past.

``I just think a lot of times people cling to memories,'' says Vann.

Also characteristic of Vann's collages are artifacts and atmospheres. Mayan stone masks and Celtic symbolism abound, and in each work, there is a sense of movement that originates in either the sky or the background - land or water.

``We are all both divine and diabolical at the same time,'' says David Vann, showing off a collage titled ``You'll Wake the Dead.''

Two stone skulls hover outside a closed iron gate from the other side of which beckons a flower garden.

``It has something to do with being on the outside - locked out of heaven,'' the artist explains.

``That's what the supernatural is all about. That stuff scares me. It's what I'm trying to express - that fear is the most primal emotion.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

David Vann re-created hell in the collage titled ``Moments.''

Color Photo

Detail from a collage by David Vann...

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