Looking Back to Move Forward

At this point I have made over 1,100 daily collages. That’s more than 3 years, and it can sometimes feel like I’m running out of ideas. When that happens, I like to look back to see if there’s something that I’ve done before that sparks me. So, over and over during these last three years, I have looked back to the collages I’ve done before for ideas and themes to explore in my daily making. It’s a way to keep moving forward, but it’s also a way to revisit and reinvestigate ideas and explore them in new and different ways.

My ideas and methods of working have grown and changed over time, and I do things a bit differently now than I did a year or two or three ago, and it can be interesting to explore old ideas through a new lens. Often, I discover an old idea that I didn’t explore very much back at the time. Maybe I didn’t have any ideas for carrying that work forward, or maybe a new idea sprang to mind and carried me away in a different direction. My history of daily collages is littered with one and done pieces, but by revisiting these older pieces, I can get new ideas and come up with new ways to explore these singular pieces or at the very least, further explore the idea with different colors or different layouts.

Below are two recent collages that I made when I looked back and discovered the collage above. It’s nothing grand, but it got me working for a couple of days, and who knows, I may come back to these ideas again sometime in the future.

And I don’t do that with just my collages. When I feel stuck or stagnant with my visual journaling, I break out old journals from years ago and sit and look. There are so many things that I did back then that I don’t do now. There are certain images, certain words, certain materials that I used 10 or 15 years ago that slowly evolved out of my way of working for whatever reason. It wasn’t that they were bad ideas or not worth pursuing, but my interests, my inspirations, and my way of working just changed. So, it’s worth going back to see if what sparked me back then can spark me again.

So if you are feeling stuck or like you’ve run out of ideas, take a look back to see if there’s something that can spark an idea now. You often find that you have a new take and a new way of doing something. Look back so that you can move forward.

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Happy Creating!

Eric