Paper Patchwork
imbued with the alchemical powers of absinthe and good champagne, I fed the cat sitting on my doorstep
Collage art entered my life as cats enter the lives of their owners. It is rare that you should have to go searching for a cat. Cats wander up on the porch one day and refuse to leave. Before you know it, you are feeding them.
This year, for me, is a sabbatical year. It is a year for distilling personal growth from the vapors of raw human experience, unadulterated by a fixed schedule and more directed pursuits (by this, I mean my career).
I started the journey by quitting.
To punctuate the year, I decided to host a two day party at the beach drawing upon the core tenets of agent-based modeling. It featured open flame cooking and some very choice cocktails. Friends and intellects flew in from all over the country to spend two days in the small town where I learned to surf and skateboard and do linear algebra. A CEO, a butcher, an Iron Man, a chess Grandmaster, and my mother ate blueberry muffins by the beach and my nephew grilled wagyu steak in the rain.
People discovered each other. Like they used to.
I welcomed everyone by making them read about the intersection between Moby Dick and AI, and about The Childhoods of Exceptional People Henrik Karlsson. I tried to slow them down enough to have a thought - the meandering kind that creep into the mind silently between the gentle moments of wakefulness and sleep. It was easy enough because, as it turned out, despite Florida’s predictably temperate climate, it rained for most of the week.
Gigi was one of the guests.
Gigi is as tall as me (quite tall), with subtle brown curls and a brilliant smile. She is energetic with big, bright eyes that betray a mind moving ten times the speed of the world around her. She is always working the room.
Gigi is a bartender. And a real estate agent. And a collage artist. Her boyfriend shapes surfboards. And takes photographs. And works as a chiropractor.
(this was a common theme among the guests. many conjunctions required to describe each person and how he or she goes into the world.)
On the second day of rain, Gigi converted our common area into an art studio. She collages everything from surfboards to coffee tables - and sometimes just plain old canvas. She litters the world with tiny magazine cutouts. She decorates her reality with a loud, esoteric style intended for those in residence at the Palm Motel. She is truly gifted. And she brought her gifts to a tiny room with mirrors, magazines, a hundred glue sticks, and an appropriately neon pink flamingo.
Slowly, cautiously, the CEO, the butcher, the Iron Man, the chess Grandmaster, and my mother all drew their weapons - Fiskars scissors and Elmer’s glue. Like elementary school children, we cut and diced, shaved and circuited, adhered and adhesed. And at the end of the day, some of us had self-portraits; others had fragments. Some had other worlds. Some had a series of snippets. I had an autobiography. And, as it turned out, a vocation that would consume my intellect for the next several months of the sabbatical.
You’ve all possibly seen that I’m a writer and have also seen that for the better part of this year, despite ample free time and mindspace, I have struggled with writer’s block. While struggling to put proverbial pen to paper, what came easily - as easily as words have for the past 15 years - were magazine scraps. Collaging began to command the full passion, curiosity, and focus within me that was previously reserved only for words.
It was rapture.
I found a kind of solace in the intricacies of the tiny pieces of paper. It was comforting to be lost in a collage, yet find footing on the stable ground of a handful of images that had been expertly (or haphazardly) cohered. I found silence in the chaos, with a playlist blazing in the basement of my little Virginia townhome. Tirelessly, endlessly, I cut and pasted, arranged and rearranged, interlocked and layered, until canvas after canvas filled my basement.
^^ dreamy collaging playlist
The most satisfying thing about collage is its dimensionality. The image of a collage is two dimensional while its impression is infinite, pulling you further into the visual anarchy and abject disregard for free space and sensical alignment. The lush images. The eclectic clutter. The prismatic, iconic statements it can make. It’s fucking beautiful. And it becomes your own personal brand of derangement.
Collage wandered in. That day at the beach, under Gigi’s unconstrained tutelage and imbued with the alchemical powers of absinthe and good champagne, I fed the cat sitting on my doorstep. Its power and wonder are imprecise but now, I’m convinced, wholly necessary. And suddenly I can’t imagine life without it.
“Now you can begin to understand why beauty is dangerous. It’s the closest thing to anarchy and liberation in our public lives.” - Ted Gioia , The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty