Curiosity, Creative Play, and Rainy Days

For the last week or so, I’ve been experimenting with paper - making mini squash books and accordion books and flowers that, when stacked and glued, open into enormous blossoms. That inspired me to order some origami paper, which led me down a rabbit hole learning how to make butterflies and birds.

It’s been a fun week of play.

I haven’t abandoned the mini collages. Quite the opposite. I’ve taken what I’ve learned cutting and pasting and am using it as fuel to make better birds (you may remember my bird phase; and another bird; and another bird) as well as bring to life some other ideas that have been simmering in my mind’s eye for a while.

Case in point: today’s collage.

For a while I’ve had a vision for a monochromatic piece using old crosswords. Other than that? No clue where it would go; I was just curious to see what I could do with a growing stack of newspaper in the recycling bin.

I sat down on a rainy Saturday afternoon to experiment with the flimsy paper to see how it might fold and how it might hold up when glued. The monochrome of the black and white, the squares, the smudged pencil - it was definitely what I was looking to play with and offered up a different result than copy or origami paper.

So I kept playing, the pile of shapes growing as I practiced.

And then, at one point, the flowers and the butterflies I’d made this week were on the table amidst scraps of crossword puzzles, and in a flash it all clicked, and the idea I had in my head began to reveal itself on the table in front of me.

I put everything aside to see if I could craft this vision into being.

In my mind’s eye, everything was supposed to sit flat on the canvas, and the butterfly was supposed to be black. It was supposed to be another mini collage, like the other 82 collages I’ve done since January.

Except, clearly none of that was how this particular collage was supposed to go.

Thank god I let the muses guide my hands, and I gave myself the entire afternoon to make mistakes and try again and again until all of the sudden...

There it was.

Yes, the red butterfly was exactly the right choice; had I not made a dozen different butterflies for no other reason than the process soothed my brain, I might not have made that discovery.

Had I not just watched a you tube video this week on how to make pop-up greeting cards it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to give the butterfly lift instead of gluing it flat to the paper.

Is it perfect? It is not. But that’s what makes it so beautiful.

The best part is that, now that I understand the mechanics of what I want to achieve, I can play with it even more. I’d like to try this on an actual canvas. That will require different glue and papers that will hold up better than old newsprint. That will require learning some new skills and experimenting with different products and processes.

That will require me to follow my curiosity, and what a fantastical requirement that is, to find something that captures my attention and then give myself time to experiment, to learn, to grow, to soak up knowledge without an agenda and store it away for a rainy day.

My entire life I’ve never able to reproduce with the depth and breadth and clarity what I see in my mind’s eye. Words on a page, promotional pieces for my old real job, art, gardening, food. I always wrote it off to being incapable of making actual art, or dismissing ideas because I can’t make them appear in real life.

This is proof that incapable is not the same as not yet equipped.

The process takes time. Not because the goal is unattainable but because to truly create I need to fully own my unique process. To try, to fail, to find the tools that work best for my hands, my brain, my process.

Is this what it feels like to be an artist? To see something in your head and slowly develop the skills to make it exist in reality, when the time is right and when you are who you need to be?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!

That journey happens by following our curiosity, by continually learning, by trying and failing again and again.

It’s true in life and in art.

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Ending the day with a little paper and glue therapy, mini collages with a focus on the process rather than the product. You can see most of the collages on my Facebook or Instagram pages, or in the Notes section of this website.

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