It’s one thing to vary photo layers and filters endlessly in a kind of obsessive and focused play. It’s another matter altogether to manage the volume of results. I get attached to these collages! What am I supposed to DO with them?
Cleaning up the downstairs study closet affords one idea: group images and print on both paper and cloth. I found print-ready silk, cotton, stickers, and loads of archival paper. What am I saving it all for?
Printing from my phone is a pain in the ass in terms of centering or sizing images, so I may have to go back to downloading onto PC and working through Photoshop elements. Ugh. I really want to preserve a body of work and in so doing, create another body of work, but I want simplicity of process!
Must also consider copyright issues. I cannot sell collages that use recognizable and/or untransformed work by other artists. Is that MOST of my collages? Maybe.
My vision of small booklets posted for purchase gets quickly dashed.
Today it’s wet. It rained hard throughout the night. I know because I was awake for a lot of it.
I’ll close with a few screen shots. Food for thought and images of — what else? — cloth!
The support and love that readers offered here moved me profoundly. Thank you! I’d considered turning comments off for the announcement that my sister had died and I’m glad I didn’t know how! Locally, friends have stepped up with legion acts of generosity. Flowers. Dinners. Errands. Packing up the apartment. Prayers. The word that I hear in my head this week to describe friendships is: MIGHTY.
My sister had many compulsions, all of which added up to a disordered life and her premature death at 64. She’d been incapacitated physically for most of the last ten years and morbidly obese for nearly the entirety of her adult life.
Her need was bottomless, her rage explosive, the triggers countless. There were many times over the last nine years when I didn’t think I would survive her. But I offered up a battered loyalty.
Relating to my sister was so crushingly difficult that the demands placed by her remaining mess feel very nearly trivial.
Her clip file, however, poses special problems. For one thing it’s huge — the equivalent of ten banker’s boxes? Fifteen? It’s hard to tell yet, because I keep finding more.
The collection was housed in boxes that lined the walls and spilled into her teensy living spaces. Also in cardboard lids, recycled Kleenex containers, drawers and scattered on table tops. Bills and medical statements mixed in. Foil packs of albuterol buried. While fetching her things (coffee, lunch, address book), I constantly tripped over some box or other. Consolidation, not allowed. I felt a constant, smoldering resentment of all her fucking paper.
The above assemblage represents just a third of the images she pulled while at the nursing home. She couldn’t sit up. Had no scissors. Knew she was dying. But she kept at it.
As for myself, being a collage artist who also sometimes uses images as writing prompts, I view these papers as a treasure trove.
The second they assume an ugly weight, which might be tomorrow, I’ll recycle.