Cut & paste

 “We're all misfits here,” he says, almost proudly. “That's why I started this squat, after all.  

For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else.  Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, 

the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird.  That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend.  

From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions.  

From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.”

--Terri Windling, Welcome to Bordertown

Collage 5-29-13

"There are no extra pieces in the universe.

Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill,

and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle."

-- Deepak Chopra

“We're so quick to cut away pieces of ourselves 

to suit a particular relationship, a job, a circle of friends, 

incessantly editing who we are until we fit in.” 

-- Charles de Lint, Happily Ever After

I haven't made a magazine collage in a while. So ... if you hate them, bear with me. And if you love them, today is your day! 

I have been chipping away at this collage for a few weeks. It just kind of lives quietly on a little table by the window, and every now and then I noodle with it, usually while I'm sorting out an idea for something else. A collage-in-progress functions like creative free-time for me, creative recess. It's malleable and changeable and forgiving and ultimately becomes a picture I didn't maybe imagine. 

A side-benefit of collage is that it also kind of frees your mind while your hands and eyes are busy searching for just the right piece (kind of like rummaging through a mountain of LEGOs for just the right block or working on a jigsaw puzzle). For me, it's kind of a palate cleanser between other projects. Like doodling.

Anyway, after a few weeks of fiddling, this collage kind of decided it was done, and I'm trying to be a good collage-whisperer who knows when enough is enough and just let it be what it is.

Remember, I am not  collage artist by any stretch nor do I profess to be. This is more of a peek into a part of my process than it is any kind of attempt at an actual finished product. I find ideas and inspiration for future faces through this medium, and I feel like some of my unspoken, underground artist's ideas get to drop by and say "hi" and have a voice.

I do think I like a couple of things about this collage, though.

I began this piece with the cascade of falling smiles that flow from the top left corner and filter through the birdcage and out the bottom. They come in all toothy grins and laughing and chatty, and then they go through the cage. It's kind of hard to see it, but there's a bird cage teeming with fading smiles, holding them captive until they're tamed, or quieted, or shut down -- until they're made into less of a smile and more of a sneer. There are still teeth visible, but all the happy is drained out in the cage. And when the cage gets too full and some of the caged un-smiles finally do escape, they are not smiles at all anymore. Just lips. Closed lips saying nothing. (*Your interpretation here!)

I am also pretty crazy about layering on faces -- putting someone else's mouth and another someone else's eyes over a another someone else's face, with someone else's hair or body. So that the eventual collage is a collection of mini-collaged individuals -- hims, hers, boys, girls, pick your mashup -- cut apart and re-made from any number of who's whos into brand new characters who all owe their existence and appearance to any number of others. They're made up of parts of each other.

Also,  I seem to use a lot of arms and hands in my collages. I am not sure what that says about me, but they are actively doing stuff all over the place, so that hands and faces tend to dominate a landscape run through by a ribbon of words.

There are lots of words in this piece, but my particular favorite words are shooting from the gun in the lower left corner, just above the chameleon. They say: "The artists will save us. Or at least blow our minds trying." 

Yep. We will.

True confessions of a cutter

“In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life 

had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, 

to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered 

of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit 

that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself.”

-- Raymond Kennedy, Lulu Incognito

Collage 4-25-13

 “That was the irony of Lulu's days; 

that she who lived in a torment of concealment 

had never known a moment when she did not feel 

the eyes of conscience upon her.” 

-- Raymond Kennedy, Lulu Incognito

On rainy days, when she was in a good mood and usually after a feverish bout of house cleaning, my mother would give me and my sisters her old magazines to cut up and paste into collages. 

Mostly she read Redbook.  The covers were warped and stiffened from the wet rings of coffee cups and Pepsi cans. Some of the pages were folded in half, diagonally, right through the middle, marking something my mother must have thought was important, or worth remembering later. The boxes of the quizzes were filled in with her funny looking, left-handed, backward-facing checkmarks.

My mother's magazines did not interest me until they became the raw material for art. I could spend forever cutting and creating with my dull-tipped safety scissors and squirt bottle of Elmer's glue. I usually made faces (go figure!)  I should say, I re-made faces, switching out the eyes, noses, mouths and hair of the beautiful models and transforming them into something a little less lovely, but definitely more interesting. In my little-kid collages, the proportions were all mixed up and wonky. The eyes didn't match. The mouths were huge. The noses went in the wrong direction, like Picasso. 

I wasn't trying to make anything meaningful or profound or controversial or attractive. 

I was just making.

Psychologists and therapists often use collage as a non-threatening art therapy tool that helps clients communicate their feelings, thoughts and emotions. According to art therapist Cathy Malchiodi:

"Magazine photo collage is widely used by art therapists largely because it's a forgiving medium, especially for individuals who are intimidated by pencils, paint, or clay. In making a collage, you don't have to go through the agony of drawing something realistic and are spared the feeling of embarrassment that your pictures look like a ten-year-old drew them ... It also doesn't demand an immediate commitment like a brushstroke across a canvas. In fact, until you glue the images to a surface, you can change your mind, experiment with composition, and add and subtract pictures until you get it right." 

(Read more at http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-healing-arts/201002/cool-art-therapy-intervention-10-magazine-photo-collage) 

I don't make collages much anymore. I made a few mixed media pieces during my "No Day Without Art" project last year. But we have had some pretty rainy days here lately and the magazines have been piling up, so I decided to go for it. There are men putting new siding on our house right now and it was kind of a weird, unsettling fishbowl experience having dudes in tool belts right outside my window while I was cutting and pasting pictures of naked ladies and eyeballs and popsicles. But hey. The show must go on.

And I must say, the collage-bug bit me again. Pretty hard. Cutting out images with an X-acto knife is super-therapeutic. Way better than safety scissors. And in case you're thinking about trying a collage yourself, glue sticks and spray adhesive make a much smoother finished product than good old Elmer's.

I know there are collage artists who do amazing, unbelievable things with this medium. Wanna get blown away? Check out the work of Derek Gores http://derekgores.com/. I don't expect to approach anything near his kind of genius with my humble collages. But I like to think that he and I can share the same swept-away,  complete absorption of losing-yourself-in-art feeling. On his website, Gores says he isn't interested in "heavy, conscious concepts" with his art, but that he is "always hoping for that feeling of having the senses of a kid, where everything is new." 

Yeah. 

Me too.