Interview: Jeffrey Meyer

I constantly find myself surfing down Tumblr’s never-ending scroll way too often. Due to original concepts, concealed meanings, and the careful construction behind each and every single piece – collages are what truly stand out amongst the site’s cluster of imagery. Time and time again, I come across the work of Jeffrey Meyer AKA Goof Button on there. With such an original approach to this medium, Meyer is one of the rare few artists that call for my full and undivided attention.

Meyer’s talent lies within his imagination and his ability to juxtapose chosen parts of different images together, unifying them into cohesive and expressive pieces. In this interview, the collagist talks to us about his shift from drawing towards collage, the meaning behind the alias Goof Button, his recent music selections, and how the best years of his life were the first ten growing up.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and where you’re from?

I grew up in Indiana in the 1970s, having what I imagine was a pretty typical American working class semi-suburban childhood: Star Wars, Estes model rockets, banana seat bicycles, metal roller skates, Rubik’s Cubes, summer camp, weekly trips to the library and zoo, five TV channels, AM radio, car sickness, drinking beer at family picnics, boners in math class, ritual Satanic sexual abuse, etc. Quite frankly I never wanted to be an adult; I knew then, with total conviction and understanding, that the first ten years of my life would be the best. Nothing since has changed my mind.

What a relief – I mean a palpable, physical, and psychological relief – to not have unmet expectations every time I sat down to work.



What initially drew you towards collage as a medium?

I used to draw – I wanted to be a cartoonist – but after a while the act began to feel like having your nervous system unspooled through your fingernails, boiled like spaghetti and then fed to hyenas. I found the results were too wound up with my emotions, what I ate that day, how much sleep I had, which way the wind was blowing, etc. I think I draw pretty well, actually, but I still feel I have no conscious, consistent control over what my hands are doing when I’m drawing, which is a problem when you have to draw the same characters over and over, in the same style, for hundreds of pages. I think my rendering (particularly brush and pen work: line weights, textures, modeling, etc.) reached a professional plateau, but ultimately I never got past a sort of stiff uncomfortableness that was too discouraging and crippling for me to ignore. My cartooning just didn’t have the sort of “handwriting” personality that the best cartoonists display. And the stories I wanted to tell – and the affect I wanted them to have – were just too complex for me to draw with such limited skills.


I had always made collage on the side, so I shifted my focus to that, What a relief – I mean a palpable, physical, and psychological relief – to not have unmet expectations every time I sat down to work. With collage I could allow myself to add to, subtract from or destroy any image I found or made; I could make many images into one, or many from one.



I have no real attachment to the medium itself. I look at collage a lot less than painting or cartooning, and I watch more movies and read more books more than I look at any visual art. Collage just happens to be the most immediately satisfying way for me to work right now. If I had an opportunity to make a film, for example, I’d have no qualms about abandoning this stuff. But I try to be pragmatic.


Can you tell us about the main themes throughout your work?

Fear of death, fear of life, financial desperation, sexual disgust, escapism, class warfare, misanthropy, ennui, self-loathing, anal retentiveness, collapse.



You’re quite prolific, how many pieces do you create typically in one day?
The nice thing about collage, for me, is that I can work on scores of pieces at once; there’s no beginning, middle or end. I’d say I average 3-5 pieces per week, which is also about how many dollars I make in the same time span from this foolish activity.

What is your design process like? Where do the images for these collages come from?

No set procedures, really. Out to the garage. Lots of tea and cookies, and bad talk radio. If it’s cold or wet, I light the stove. At dark I put the chickens in. Pee in a bottle every couple hours.



I just move piles of paper from one side of my desk to the other, keeping in mind vague categories like “background” or “architecture” or “skin disease” which, when recognized, I then put aside, in the corner of my vision. Then I keep leafing through the pages until something seems like it might compliment or contrast one of the previously saved pages. Increasingly, I generally respond to light, color, texture and shape rather that whatever actual image is on the page. Eventually I’ll have maybe a dozen sets of maybe six pages each, which I then concentrate on one set at a time until I find out what may or may not work. Before I do any fine cutting or final gluing, I glance through all the sets to see if any of the components from one might work better in another.



I find the source material all over the place. I used to work in very large library, so a lot of my earlier stuff drew from a big stash of discards and unwanted donations I’ve carried all over the country with me since then. I sometimes buy runs of magazines on ebay: large pictorial titles from the 40s through the 70s like Playboy, Fortune, various women’s mags, certain scientific journals, etc. Now I tend to find stuff on my local library’s “free” shelves.


When and how did your collaboration with Jesse Treece come about? What is Jesse and your approach to these works?

I had been keeping a folder of duplicate images which was growing pretty thick, and I’d wanted to collaborate with someone, thinking it would be fascinating to see how two different artists utilized the same material. I liked Jesse’s approach to landscape, scale, perspective, and thought I might learn something from a collaboration with him. Quite frankly, I also thought it was the kind of thing that would get us a bit of attention.



He agreed to the project, so I pulled about half of the images from the folder, randomly grouped them into sets of 3-6 pics, then mailed those and the remainder of the images to Jesse; he made groups of the remaining half, and sent those to me. I thought it was a nice disciplined approach and I enjoyed it.


How did you get the name Goof Button and what is the meaning behind it?

That was a mistake that never should have happened. I’m not sure why so many people think it’s my alter ego or whatever – I just thought it would be a funny URL for my site. I guess it was a pretty common term post-WW2, if the era’s magazines are any indication. I suppose my use of “Goof Button” indicates my disdain of technology, especially in relation to art making, and my reluctance at the time to even get a website.

I utilized one example I found of the word in this piece.

What music have you been listening to lately?

Jay-Z, Kanye West, Tyler the Creator and the rest of OFWGKTA, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B & Rakim, Tool, Journey, Robin Hitchcock, Emitt Rhodes, Tiny Tim, Todd Rundgren, Slowdive, Moondog,, Judee Sill, The Twilight Singers, Gene Clark, Beverly Kenney, Nas, The Millennium, Randy Newman, The Beckies, Guns N’ Roses, Roger Miller, J Dilla, Etc.



What are you currently working on and what do you have planned down the pipeline?

I have a couple album covers coming up, and I’m participating in a collage group show in Brooklyn at the end of October, called “All That Remains” After that, it’s back to cleaning toilets.