Back at the drawing board/collage table - older, wiser, and married
well... older and married for sure, wiser remains to be seen
This past week is one I’ll never forget, that’s for sure. Sitting here at my desk back at home, it all feels surreal. Did I really leave the house the day before yesterday in a bikini and head for the beach? Yep. Did it really take two days to get home? Yep. Is that really snow outside? Yep. Did I really just get ambushed by my own surprise wedding? Yep.
Doing this reality check isn’t actually helping make any of it more real, so I’ll just return to my previously scheduled programming, pick up my pencil, and draw something.
Or, play around with collage.
Remember those Griffin and Sabine books?
The author, Nick Bantock, is a dab hand at creating cool word/image combination pages - whole books full of them, in fact. Using collage, mixed media, and text he spins yarns that have caught the attention of readers and visual explorers around the world.
I spotted a copy of Bantock’s The Trickster’s Hat: A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity when I was at the library back in my pre-married days, recently enough that the book still isn’t overdue. It’s a collection of prompts and exercises meant to loosen you up and send you off down some fun creative alleys to see what you might find lurking around and wanting to be explored.
I pulled the book off the shelf and decided to tackle a collage prompt. Childhood (my collage at the top of the newsletter) was meant to be one of three pieces in an autobiographical triptych. The three eras, Childhood, Teens and Youth and Adulthood felt a bit truncated. I mean, childhood lasts until age 10? 12? The teen years are pretty quick and chaotic. I had a wild time in my 20s (marriage #1, divorce, degree, child, some other stuff that would be tricky to glue to the page in a collage…). My 30s were… a blur. The farming era in my 40s was intense. Then, 50-something hit and wow - suddenly I was sailing oceans and climbing mountains. And now, as I roll into my 60’s another wedding.
At the very least I’ll divide my adulthood into early, middle, and now (may need to further divide by decade and, if I do that, what decade would you be most interested in seeing through the sticky lense of a Mod Podge haze?), but this evening only has a limited number of hours so the subsequent pieces will need to wait.
I further broke the rules (are there rules when you are goofing around and playing with your creative impulses and a tub of Mod Podge?) by using colour images (there was a definite shortage of black and white images in the handful of magazines I happened to have handy).
Tearing up magazines is a random exercise to start with, but even though the task was to find photos that somehow related to the particular life phase I was focussed on, Bantock suggests letting the randomly stumbled upon pictures lead the way rather than trying to find ways to illustrate particular life events by searching for something that resembles pneumonia. Actually, he doesn’t mention pneumonia (or nuns) but both featured heavily in my first near-death experience when I was five. Neither nuns nor pneumonia made it into the collage, so don’t search too hard.
In my case, I further stretched the exercise by jotting down a list that includes things not actually captured in the collage (I wrote all this explanatory stuff after I finished the collage exercise, which is why nuns and pneumonia are also missing from the written list). Nuns and pneumonia aside, rooting around in the rather scrambled pile of stuff that was harvested from the pages of magazines procured from the thrift store, you’ll get a glimpse of my childhood.
From God Save the Queen to hot dogs, strawberries (reminded me of my Omi, who grew fat strawberries in Bavaria), lots of blue (my favourite colour as a child, even though my mother thought it should be yellow or red), to Saturday morning cartoons, various animals (including the falcon from My Side of the Mountain), the images I stumbled across did trigger unexpected memories and inspire unanticipated connections. Which, I suppose, is what the creative process is all about.
Messy? Yep. Fun? Yep. Logical and complete? Not even close.
If you do tackle this prompt (or any of the others in Bantock’s book), I’m going to try again to set up a place where we can all share our ongoing creative journeys. I believe this will actually be in a Substack group chat and I think you’ll likely get some sort of invitation in an email. Not 100% sure as I’m still figuring out this whole Substack ecosystem.
Until tomorrow - adieu!
**Note that from time to time I include links to cool things I like playing with - like Mod Podge - and if you click on one of those links and wind up at Amazon and then proceed to buy one of those cool things a) we would probably have a fun time hanging out on a rainy Sunday and b) Amazon will send me a teeny tiny commission.**