WHILE Richard “Marlowe” Schneider may not be an artist in the sense that he paints or draws, the work that he does is very much art—albeit of the kind that takes the idea of subtlety and throws it out the window with no small measure of glee.

A self-proclaimed “assembler,” Marlowe uses ephemera images from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s as the main focus for his pieces. From there, he builds backgrounds using handmade paper. He is, in the strictest sense of the phrase, a pulp artist.

A former creative director in the advertising industry, Marlowe has clearly been in touch with his creative side for a long time, though he was somewhat stifled by the restrictions of working with clients. Doing art for himself freed Marlowe to try combinations of different styles, and he ultimately landed on mixed media. A great lover of texture, dimension, shadow and saturated color, he creates his pieces to be the sort that “grabs you by the lapels.” Arguably, those are the very qualities that make his work so popular, giving his quirky art an appeal that is almost hard to pin down.

Marlowe’s work is represented at Artistic Transfer in Dallas and New Elements Gallery in Wilmington, North Carolina.