A phone call yesterday.....

The smell of wax and the texture of the paper had me hooked from an early age. The shape and the repetitive line of different colors with a triangle crown and the paper wrapped around the outside.   Yes I'm describing crayons and a color book.  I can still remember the way the paper gently in a big heap folded over like a wave and the aroma, I was in heaven at a very early age.

This quote popped up on Facebook yesterday and then I looked up Georgia O'Keeffe quotes and this was reproduced many times with different back grounds.  

Connection? 

Phone Call?  

Where is the Collage movement going?  

Is it something like the pet rock movement?  God I hope not...how does one keep what they enjoy to do alive and out there when some many streams of income center around it?  

Questions, Awareness and what next?  

(If you haven't noticed it's one of those days when the question, Who am I, Why am I and Where am I has come up)

Describing life through....Georgia says,"Colors and Shapes, that I couldn't say any other way-things I had no words for....

With learning how to draw the basics from my grandfather I've always gravitated to shapes...and repetitive shapes.  It's not about having more, it's about seeing the effect and how I feel when there is more presented.  Kind of like the What if Question,,,what if I had 9 red circles not one? 

Yes here I go again trying to understand and make connections with all this stuff from my pass that has been a good friend and partner and still is in to adulthood..

Well I don't have an answer but if one depends on the income that the art movement of collage has in teaching and workshops realm then that is a concern. 

One might have to re invent a different approach using papers and glues, mixing up the mediums on the surface before or after their glued down.  

Back to paper...the medium of paper one of my first loves. Coming from a plant, like cotton, cooked and beating down to a wondrous fiber vat, pull out  and then pressed flat or hung to dry with texture.  Like fabric, additive were included to form different kinds of papers and for different uses.  Water was used to form these papers re-connection the fibers in an inner-locking way.  I learned about this some years back and went through the process of making my own.  Cattail leaves, Yucca leaves, Iris and day lily leaves are a few of the sources of material besides cotton that paper can be made from around me. 

I went through a moment where paper was the thing and I made lots of it day in day out...from early in the morning to late at night in a tent outside.  It is a beautiful process of pulling a sheet of paper and listening to the water drip out and then watching it couch on to the felt sheet. 

Goofy owl I found on one of my walks in the wood by a stream after a big rain...he's just watching over things...any ways....

The question was posed to me is   Collage a movement or phase like the pet rock where has it's seen it's days and now it's out?

I watched it come alive in the last 20 years...oh my... never would I have believed I would be saying that but witnessing a movement in the arts...kind of cool.  I started with my own papers, handmade and using bee wax as a natural sealant...not a glue...I used mat medium back then. Encaustic wasn't big as it is now. It just started to come back into the scene. I think Jasper John's work was on exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute a few year after I started using the handmade papers and bees wax.

I thinking...that I've been fortunate for over 20 years to be able to do what I love to do. I've learned so much and I have know Idea what I'm doing and where I'm going... What I do, is creativity think of ways to keep doing the art making and that has come to teaching it and if it dye's out so be it...I will have to find a 9 to 5'er...but I've always been an artist and I will always be.  To the creative process of always thinking in new ways.