February | 2020 | Pattern and Outrage : Dee Mallon

I went abstract with the Prompt to depict a welcoming space from which to create in the future. Note: WP fucked with my type again!

The sky blazing with sunset. A shell with her boundaries and her secrets. And a leaping big cat with a body of prose.

The collage speaks to time, self, and energy, rather than to space.

I spent part of today at Staples, hoping to have fun making shiny copies of some of the last month’s collages. I transferred images from phone to a thumb drive in advance, but turns out the machine needed pdf’s and mine were jpeg. A young guy helped with the conversions. That took awhile.

A few pix were weirdly formatted (HEIC?). He speculated: an apple format designed not to be compatible with anything. Printer guy smiled when I muttered, “the fuckers.”

But the real disappointment was the copier itself. On the former color copier I could adjust for scale (necessary to make SoulCollage cards) and could play with color saturation.

Not anymore. Just print. Plus each print required four button presses, each with their dragging delay. More if I wanted a preview.

You can email pix to a staples website, too, so I tried that after a while. You email pix to their site and they shoot you a code and you input it and go from there. But since I chose medium resolution (thinking higher would take forever), the results were disappointing.

There you can see my nifty phone-jacked thumb drive.

Why is it that so many technological advances strip out features that were critical to an interesting and satisfying result?

Prompt #29:

collage a welcoming PSYCHIC space that supports your ongoing creative goals & activities.

Acey’s Collage Month.

See also my Flickr album, SoulCollage, and the tags for SoulCollage and collage here on the blog.

Collage month final prompt.* The “seed collage” here on the left is not a seed and not a collage either but there you have it. It’s the last page of the sketchbook.

It looks like a peaceful scene, a couple (perhaps the man has retired?) looking out over the ocean. It’s a place of repose, regeneration, and beauty. The couple comes here often in between doing other things and going other places.

So a big thank you to Acey for vibrant and energized leadership through a month of well-timed and created prompts. She made a nest we could all climb in and fly out of repeatedly. There was a lot of excitement, connection with others, and discovery.

I haven’t finished yet, though. You didn’t think I had, did you? Many blank pages remain in my sketchbook and many loosely laid images have yet to be glued. Stay tuned. Below are some of the pages I either glued up yesterday or hadn’t yet photographed.

This week I made some survival decisions: I shall resume a meditation practice. I shall get on my exercise bike frequently. I shall listen to new music (I felt unbearably OLD watching the Grammys this year).

And, as a starter activity, I resumed writing postcards. Right now: to Florida registered Dems to inform them that they can vote by mail. It’s easy, it’s concrete, and it might make a difference.

Go to postcardstovoters to sign up. There’s a little bit of a screening process mostly to do with handwriting and the ability to follow directions, but then it’s easy. I get addresses by texting.

Corrupt-genius just expanded the Muslim ban to six more countries. The first time he pulled this shit, lawyers flooded the airports. Protests broke out all over the country. I took part in a well-attended rally in Copley Square THE VERY NEXT DAY. And today?

Something like shell shock. One friend said she didn’t think she could feel worse than she did on Election Day but does. I get it.

One of the newly banned countries is Nigeria, the most populated country in Africa, aka a “shithole country.”

Given the catastrophic recent events and the worse events sure to follow, how do you plan to take care of yourself? What concrete steps will you be taking to get a Democrat in the WH come fall?

Acey’s Collage Month.

See also my Flickr album, SoulCollage, and the tags for SoulCollage and collage here on the blog.