Drawing with Scissors and Glue

Its a good thing I can create pictures and feelings out of words because I sure can't do it with a pencil or pen. Or with paint or pastels, or with charcoal or crayons, or in a box or with a fox.

I can't draw. And stop rolling your eyes and thinking that all I need to do is sit down with the right book and the right tool and believe in myself.  I do believe in myself.

I believe that I can't draw.

But that's ok because I just rediscovered that I had already discovered a way to express myself in imagery.

Collage. That potluck dinner of a medium whereby I set the table with my scissors,my glue and my paper, and you artists bring all the paintings, sketches, and photos for the main dishes. Its a meal I first started making when I needed something more than journal writing to unravel the knotted thoughts within me. And it stayed with me as I became a (slightly) more confident Creator of Stuff, willing to put my toe in the water of creating for its own sake.

Note: in case it isn't obvious, my results are for personal consumption only so please don't sue me. I am serious about not stealing art from artists, plus I know Himself would not accept the charges when he hears "This is a collect call from an inmate at World's End Copyright Violator's Correctional Facility." 

I started my collages in a large sketchbook, which I just laid hands on again.

Its like a big coffee table book of paper quilts:

And, more interesting now to me, a treasury of smaller blocks hidden in the whole:

It is also a pictorial guide to my life.  Here's when Thing One went off to college...

And here's when I rebooted. In 3D,yet.

Here I am adrift in perimenopause...

And here I am, landing safely on the other side.

Dragged down by events...

 

Bewildered by my brain...

 

And a blessed, albeit fleeting, day where I made sense of it all.

Collage is the only form of creating that I can do without planning. Where I successfully let go. I start with one piece that catches my eye and then glue with abandon, until the story my soul has been trying to tell me unfolds. Or until I've glued the sketchbook to the table.

I put this sketchbook aside and have started a new one. But instead of a journal to write in and sketchbook to glue in, I now have a single book where I do both. As an inaugural collage event, I gave myself ten minutes (9 of which were spent pulling off dried glue from the cap of the stick I forgot to tighten in 2007) and here's what happened.

 

Even the words streamed together from bits and pieces...

Planning a visit to the Cafe of Promise and Loss. If that isn't what being 60 is about, I don't know what is.  I know it because the gluestick told me.

And I never would have known it if I knew how to draw.