handwriting

The last project for my collage workshop was to incorporate handrwriting:

I have just a meager stash of collage materials (I will never quit you, Brown Paper), but had a surprising collection of handwriting samples. In the past I would have been reluctant to use them, though that feels completely silly to admit... Why get protective and hoard-y about bits of paper? They're speciaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllll.

But this turned out to be the funnest assigment for me: I was protective about nothing. In fact, if there was a bit that I liked too much and was trying to work the entire composition around, I deliberately covered it up. 

That sounds kind of silly, too. WHY AM I SO PROTECTIVE ABOUT PAPER.

But every time I covered up something I thought defined and anchored the whole piece, the whole piece got better. Like Annie Dillard says, sometimes you have to take out a wall. Sometimes it is the bearing wall. 

These quick little pieces are a good place for me to practice this. 

So many of my paintings have suffered because I was protecting them -- couldn't push them past that layer that was supposed to be just a warm-up layer but had some interesting little bit that I got weirdly attached to and wouldn't want to cover up. 

But here, all the truly interesting bits happened in the covering up... I hope that lesson translates from paper to paint. 

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what the paper will do

Another assigment for the online collage workshop was this sweet little accordian book:

It has been very good to keep my hands busy with collaging. I am too impatient to paint these days, feeling all flayed open and distracted. But collage takes somehow less brain power and is more immediately gratifying.

It's good to crank them out, it's good to have deadlines. This is the benefit of school and classes of any kind: stop being precious and do the work. 

I like it, despite its clumsiness. It's a strange story in an unlikely little diary.

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pursuit of patterns

The human brain loves patterns. 

I read an interview once with author and educator Parker Palmer, who asserted that it's our brain's strongest function: creating and following patterns. "The brain is a patterning organ," he said, "it thrives on making connections."

It amused me that among the many intricate and boggling functions our brains perform, there would be one it did best -- liked best. 

How satisfying, then, to work on this assigment, which was to create my own patterned paper and incorporate it into a collage:

It's ironic, too, that I arrive at more dynamic and visually interesting pieces when I think less.

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