Category Archives: Collage

“Riot is the language of the unheard”

Lying on the couch after dinner, half-asleep and wondering when all the shows about WWII will finally dry up, I suddenly remembered the dead robin in my bag. Eek! I’d picked it up on our walk yesterday with the intention of burying her here and then forgotten.

Still in my bag? Sleeved in a newspaper plastic but still. I’m going to California in the morning. Imagine if I’d forgotten it altogether.

I found that butterfly tag in my carryon laptop bag. “Riot is the language of the unheard.” Where did I hear that? A slightly haunting relic of the summer of George Floyd? Does anyone know who said it? [thank you Deb and Nancy. This was said by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.]

And, to pick up on Grace’s blog about creative endeavor, there is that question that thrums through the life of a maker. Why? Why do you do it? In particular, what is the point of all these collages, many of which exist purely in ones and zeroes on a screen?

This one is paper, but uses a print out of a digital collage in the background (me, peeking out above the book).

One thing I said in the comments is that there are very few things I do in life that don’t require overcoming resistance. Ugh. This again? Working with pattern in cloth and collage is not like that. I just find myself doing it. For that reason alone it’s a valuable, ongoing exercise.

There’s more to say about this, but as Jude recently noted on her blog, maybe the saying matters a whole lot less than simply continuing.

Right now, I’m “getting” scenes about some characters living in Boulder during the pandemic. I have no idea yet whether this is a viable project. There are ecstatic dancers who appear and disappear (all women) and no one knows what to make of them. There is a feral boy who lives deep in the woods. There’s a mom and her three kids, one of who is decompensating (again). Her middle child is a lawyer working for a social justice group that objects to decisions being made about the former bomb factory at Rocky Flats (turn plutonium-contaminated land into a public park? Really?)

I share this because, like the collages, the scenes keep coming whether I want them to or not. I’m sure Deb can speak to this.

Okay. Off to give Ken a tour of recently planted perennials so he knows what to water in my absence. Mostly divided hosta. Oh those reliable and prodigious hosta!

A visual journal

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*Pardon the repeat from Instagram and FB.

First the components: the B&W profile supplied by Paris Collage Club as this week’s prompt; the paper collage using the prompt and magazine cutouts; a photo of K on Mt. Washington in Los Angeles, full size and cropped.

Variations made using dianaphotoapp as usual. I also used the app called Grungetastic for the third image. A number of older collages (both paper and digital) got layered into a couple. Usually I like selections that keep the week’s prompt very distinct and central. But then again, the combos where the prompt nearly disappears can also intrigue me.

You’ll notice in one collage the National Geographic image of an Egyptian man dragging a net. I have riffed off of this photo for two years now (from Acey’s challenge and before). I’m not sure why it compels me so, but writing this post I now see (duh) how my photo of K echoes that silhouette.

I’ve printed out a couple of these and will go back to paper and see what comes up.

But first, we are off the buy compost and a few flowers (it’s almost Mother’s Day after all!)

Still cool, the air, not me

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In a matter of days, K flies to India, which just happens to be where a new highly contagious variant of Covid is running rampant. Arcturus. The last time my husband traveled, he came home with Covid.

So I’m worried. About his heath. And mine. And since I fly to visit my brother within days of his return, also about my brother’s. We may live in separate rooms when K gets back just to be careful.

When I told my brother, he was pretty cavalier about it. For some reason it took me a full twenty-four hours to remember how much risk he lives with week-to-week. His partner is an emergency room doctor.

Not related to any of that, please find a new digital collage above.

As I wrote on Instagram:

Speaking of my manuscript, I deleted another 1,000 words yesterday. I’m officially under 130,000 now!

And speaking some more about writing, Deb Lacativa and I are critical reading partners (more involved than say, a beta reader) and she has begun feeding me new scenes. Completely captivating new scenes, need I add?

In all my noodling last night, a paragraph from Prophets Tango showed up. I loved reading this passage the first time. And the second. And third. You get the idea.

I can’t share an Amazon link because I’m on my phone (?) but if you just search the title in books, all three volumes come up.

New technique alert

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Much of creative discovery is propelled by laziness — or at least in my case, it is. It’s not that I mind performing lots of discrete steps or putting in the time (sometimes an obscene amount of time, I might add), it’s that I don’t always love some of the individual steps — for instance, gluing shit down.

Enter the scene: 8 1/2 x 11” sticky paper designed to be fed into an inkjet printer. Oh, am I psyched about this!

Step one: rip and cut collage elements. Place on blank page. No glue. Photograph.

This is as ephemeral as you can get, by the way, because by the end of this process, this arrangement will no longer exist. Digital record only. Do I mind the curling edges and the shadows produced by them? Sometimes. Sometimes not.

Step two: run photo of unglued collage through a bunch of filters using dianaphoto app.

My favorites below combined the collage and a photo I took of very weathered wood — perhaps a window opening to a slave cabin? I don’t remember. Using the “roll the dice” function for shuffling images in dianaphoto means I don’t always recognize what comes up and, having 13,000+ pictures on my phone, I don’t necessarily want to track down the source (see laziness, above).

Step three: select one photo of a layered collage and print onto sticky paper. Trim and stick to sketchbook page.

Step four: pillage elements from original collage (remember, nothing was glued down) and adhere them to the print/layered version.

I have trouble getting the interface between my phone and printer to do what I want it to, so I often just go with what comes out. In this case the slight change in scale served the design.

PS Sometimes I use the app “whitagram” to add a white border around an image so that when I print it, the image is smaller. In this case, I didn’t.

PPS The photo of the weathered wood was taken with the app “Hipstamatic” which applied the off-white faux paper photo border and also muted some of the color.

Maybe I’ll try to find the original after all. But first, it’s shrimp scampi for lunch (inspired by Melissa Clark’s cooking video on NYTimes cooking app) and then I’ve got to bake Za’atar Parmesan Pinwheels (same app) for a 75th bday party tonight!

The two female faces showed up in an earlier collage, some filtered versions below.

Falling apart / gluing together

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I have a bunch of collage books. They’re generally not art books but rather something between pattern studies and wish lists for interior design.*

There’s a freedom in cutting and pasting without worrying too much about the results.

I pulled a notebook out yesterday that’s falling apart. This intersection of picture-edge and coil failure is probably my favorite shot from the book.

I used to use rubber cement. It often fails with time. I like the marks it leaves behind too.

You’ll notice some themes: barns and fabric, angels and antique maps of the heavens, flowers. Death and ghosts. Love and more flowers.

The peony/Browning poem with a picture of D as a young boy is a copy from another Sketchbook Project, the one I cannot find on the site. The theme was : Jackets, Blankets, and Sheets.

Rubber cement mark on lower left.

Sometimes the order of the images matters. I like the way the three above relate to each other.

And sometimes (often?), the collages reveal that I was thinking about my novel, like the ones below.

In the period that I wrote about (1737 to 1744), many of the enslaved had just been kidnapped from Africa. They were called “saltwater slaves” or “comyahs” (as opposed to “binyahs”) (say those two words aloud and they’ll make sense). In other words, in the early colonial period, some slaves were born here and some in Africa. I’ve thought a lot about what it would have meant to have memories of home, to have been ripped away from a coherent society and family, to be force marched and shipped to these shores into lives of brutality, abject humiliation, and privation.

These geographical and soul wounds can be viewed through the lens of indigo. Eliza Pinckney was an early innovator, but the slaves who harvested, aerated, and acidified the batches of dye may have had very specific memories about the crop, not to mention expertise. I learned about the Tuaregs of the Sahara, also known as “the blue men” for their intense deep indigo blue turbans — cloth which when unwrapped would leave blue shadows across their foreheads. I learned that in some areas of Western Africa cloths were woven with indigo threads to swaddle babies at birth. The same cloths would be worn at weddings and then used as shrouds at the end. Also, I learned that men tended to be the weavers.

I could say more about all of this but will leave it here for now.

Image of gate leading out of barracoon, west coast of Africa, plus other images.

* Exceptions: The Sketchbook Projects, collected collages done under Acey’s direction, and two books of Paris Collage Club works (one done, one in progress).

Pattern and Outrage

cloth, justice, writing, and food