Scissors and Glue

& learning something new

"I'm taking an online collage class" I announced in a group text with my parents and siblings a week or two ago. My dad later said he wondered if it was a spelling class. While it WOULD be in character for me to sign up for an online college course, the last time I took any sort of art class was back in high school, and though I worked 10+ years employing my self-taught graphic design skills for pay, making visual art has not exactly been my main trail.

Earlier this year, I told an artist friend that Ryan and I had spent an afternoon together — we went to antique stores, the pet store, and an art gallery. “The art guy was in process of a painting so I chatted with him awhile while Ryan looked around. I told him that I have friends who are artists, maybe some day I’ll take a class and try being one too. 😊” My friend jumped right on that trail of thought with me and pointed me to this self-paced online collage course which I eventually signed up for and have been thoroughly enjoying!! Cut and paste. I feel like a little kid! it is delightful!! Trying combinations of color and shape, changing, trying, changing, trying, gluing it down and moving on.

Amidst plenty of ongoing stressors in my life, I’ve also been struggling in recent weeks with an unidentified source of pain (which may just this past week have been traced to arthritis in my sacroiliac joint) but meanwhile, I have found that cutting colors and shapes out of paper and then pasting them together has been a fantastic, chill distraction.

I’ve been making progress in pain reduction, but for many nights in a row I was not getting much sleep. On one of those sleepless nights, after signing up for the collage course, I was scrolling through the private Facebook page for the class and discovered that a long time family friend (who is a very talented artist and high school art teacher) had also taken the class a couple years ago. I saw that when she posted a picture of her completed first exercise for the class on Facebook she noted that she had used “a 1963 National Geographic” for the project.

I mentioned this in my family text thread, laughing about the fact that, in contrast, I had used a Costco Connection magazine for my work. David immediately piped up on this thread - “a RECENT Costco Connection?” he wanted to know. Uh. Oh.

David is a Costco enthusiast. to understate the case. Besides esteeming the very good value of buying bulk goods, (except when I end up throwing away 10 of the 12 packages of seaweed because he only ate 2 and the rest have been sitting in the cupboard for a very long time and now we need to pack for our move), he also places great faith in the quality of items he can buy at Costco » “They’ve done the research and know what people like and what is good.” I, on the other hand, don’t have very much tolerance for Costco shopping. It is far too big and overwhelming for the way my brain works after head injury. And so, for the past many years, David has (happily) mostly done the Costco shopping on his way home from work. And he also reads the Costco Connection magazine. Which I had just cut and pasted as the first entry in my brand new sketchbook.

Lucky for David going forward, the lesson I worked on last week was making my own “paper” out of transparencies, paint, and a Gelli plate. I had never done any sort of print making before and this project was great fun! The assignment was ultimately intended to result in a flower/garden themed collage, so as I rolled yellow and red paint, pressed paper and transparencies into it and then lifted colors, I was delighted to see the interesting designs come through. What fun it was to visualize ways to cut into the paper and work from there!

I had the whole process all cleaned up and put away before I realized I didn’t have any green. How was I going to make a garden without green?!? I had been using paints I already had around the house for this project and I literally did not have any green paint! I was disappointed because I was eager to get onto the next step of collage and didn’t want to have to go to the store for green. It took a few minutes before it occurred to me that I had yellow paint AND blue paint. I immediately got the paints and Gelli plate back out and made green.

And then got started cutting and pasting:

It has been an interesting process, this making art with scraps of paper and glue. I am starting at the very beginning, bringing very little knowledge or experience into the work, except that I already knew how to cut with scissors and paste with a glue stick. Along this way I have discovered how hard it can be to glue things down! Not so much for the act of gluing down. I’m okay with committing. But in the try/change/try/change sequence — when I finally decide I like a particular combination and start the gluing process, I lift a piece to apply glue and that action invariably shifts the other pieces. Even if I took a picture for reference before starting the gluing, the final result tends to be different than what I initially settled on. I’ll probably find ways to improve this process for myself and it’s not a big deal, but it’s been interesting to note. This is where I think a beginner’s mind seems to play in my favor. As I work, I am not expecting the result to be deemed “good art” - whatever that means. (I actually have many thoughts down that exhausting trail.) Instead, absorbed by the ever shifting combinations of color, and shape, texture, design. I am simply delighting in the process.

An interesting observation I have made about this work is a parallel I found to the writing process. My original idea for the flower garden included two red flowers and three yellow. But one of the red flowers I first cut was different than the one I ended up with. I liked the shape of the first flower, but as I closed in on the final product, I could not find a way to fill the center in a way that fit with the rest of the design. I tried a bunch of different things.

Finally, I messaged my artist friend (who I frequently pester with questions and exclamations like: LOOK WHAT I MADE & I LOVE THIS PROCESS SO MUCH). I sent her a picture and said, I like the shape of the right hand flower, but it's got white bubbles that I want to shade but I haven't found the right solution. so I'm going for a walk. 🙂

David walked through the kitchen right about then and I said to him, you know what? In writing, you sometimes just have to delete the whole paragraph. I think that’s where I am at.

I went for a walk and when I came back, I cut a new flower.

And glued it down.

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Related tidbits and other miscellany from my week —

Austin Kleon has a good collection of thoughts and links on learning something new: Learn to play the fool.

Following a link in that Austin Kleon post, I found a book by Tom Vanderbilt that I am now reading, thoroughly enjoying, and will no doubt reference in future posts: Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

Speaking of learning new things - This is our second year with a small fruit orchard to prune! And I wrote about that fact here last week: Echoes of Mary Oliver at pruning time.

And here are the chickens offering opinions.

On Saturday morning I logged on to Calvin University’s January Series to find a lecture to watch while I worked on a jigsaw puzzle. With no prior reference point, I chose Kendall Vanderslice —Table Talk: Building Community as We Eat and fell down a rabbit hole. After listening to her talk and jotting down some notes, I clicked through to find out more about this baker, writer, and founder of the Edible Theology Project. I discovered the audible version (she reads it ) of her recent book, By Bread Alone, was available to me through my library and so I downloaded it and had listened to the entire thing by Sunday afternoon.

On my trails through her work, I also discovered that Kendall is the baker behind this Instagram video my sister showed me a few months ago —Kendall has been digging up old church cookbooks from around the country, choosing a recipe, and making it! (That link is Kendall’s making of the super niche “Scripture Cake” 😂 ) She describes her project: I’m about to cook my way through 100+ church cookbooks, spanning all 50 states. In the process I’m excited to discover a bit more about the religious experiences of women from a variety of denominations through the notes they took and the recipes they made. If you have experience with church cookbooks/church potlucks, you will likely enjoy her series of posts on Instagram.