When words miss the mark
Nothing like cutting paper with ✂️
Perhaps the greatest cut-out artist of all time, Henri Matisse had this to say about scissors (and paper).
“A pair of scissors is a … wonderful instrument … Working with scissors … is an occupation I can lose myself in … My pleasure in cutting things out grows ever greater … By entering into the object …” 1
I come into my own. I become the object I am creating.
Words hurt. Miss the mark. Either that or are too glib. Fail me, or I fail them. Realized the other day, I’ve lived here more than a year and haven’t done a single collage.
“The days before photoshop! Great collage!” Writers Elephant Olvin Whitlock commented on my post of an old collage, and I realized I am an antique. Guess I’ve always been an antique. Magazines and newspapers I depended on as my source of images have practically shrunk into non-existence. Makes me feel that way too—a bit shrunken and misshapen but better the images themselves than the words.
Reminded of the need for visual images by my shrinking sense of self, I began the search through my photo archives—pictures grouped by subject, i.e., a particular subjective leaning, stored in large Ziploc bags, and “filed” in stacks in plastic stacking storage bins I stowed away in the closet when I first got here. Very neat and clean and completely out of the way.
What would I find, I wondered, as I took the dare and began emptying the Ziploc bags and spreading the images all over the bed in the tiny guest room where I keep the stowaways.
I had an idea—of a place—on the antique glass coffeetable in the parlor downstairs—where I could spread the images out and let them live again. Only to realize I can’t find my glue-sticks and they are probably dead by now anyway—all dried up and gone to glue-stick heaven. I’ll get some at the dollar store tonight on the way back from my meeting, I thought. Let the antiques have a life—I have finally arrived at the place where I live. Where I really live.
How a collage comes together*
The unified appearance of a collage may more easily lend itself to a description of how its parts come together than a painting, in which the paint brush and the application of paint carry and erase the preceding and succeeding impulses. Though a collage is sometimes viewed as a conglomerate of randomly chosen images, its synthesis flow from an opening represented by a decision to say “yes” to what wants to come out.
Images with initial appeal may sit in the compost heap for months or years before asking me directly to find a use for them, or a particular image may demand to be grounded in a setting right away. I do not experience the true power and depth an image holds for me, until I have the courage to articulate it’s intricacies with my scissors, cut right into the heart, lift it out and drop it into a different context. No image is too sacred to be deconstructed. When I let go of the reins, it is as if the images within my chosen images are set free.
The unique visceral satisfaction I receive as I work keeps me in a hovering state of uninterrupted concentration until the whole thing is finished. A collage may be completed very swiftly, but all sense of time may stop between impulse and examination and execution of impulse.
When I am sure (I know in my body) that my attention is being drawn in the right direction (I’m not distracted), a feeling of excitement reigns. When a certain “effect” or living relationship is achieved, the peak is short-lived, as exhilaration feeds the next related impulse, not ceasing until the transfusion of imagery has said it all.
The gestalt becomes a poem*
When I showed some of my (now old) collages to an artist friend of mine, we began talking about how an artist depicts her own experience. She asked me if I had ever tried speaking as if I were the collage. I practically stopped breathing.
To speak as if I were the collage would challenge the growing distance between me and it, once the creative process ceases. To speak as if I were all parts and elements of the collage would allow me to enter into the nature of creation.
*Excerpt from The Healing Expression of the Undiminished Voice, an independent study in creative expression, written under my pen name, Marilyn Manzanita, 1998.
Gilles Neret, Matisse: Cut-Outs (Taschen, 2006), 85.
Maybe.🤫🥰
My experience (these last years) when I made an acrylic painting has been that "I was there". On the canvas, in the zone, in the moment, in the creation process. So I can relate to what your friend said about you speaking as you were the collage, or you being in your art.
It's like an art piece is a place, a place you visit, and that you give something of yourself to it and eventually leave, to go somewhere else! Leaving parts of yourself behind. And sometimes you can look at your work and go back to that time you were there, in memory, and remember how it was being there, but realizing that you can never go back and experience it the same way again..