A Walk in the Woods

I thought I’d share a glimpse into my creative process today. 

I did some monotype practice, making black and white dendritic prints. Those are the ones where you squish paint or ink between two panes of glass or sheets of metal – two impermeable flat surfaces – then pry them apart, leaving a pattern of branching forms on each surface made by the physics of fluids. You then pick up the patterns on your paper, producing two mirrored images.

There are a lot of tutorials on Youtube, so I’m not going to teach you how to do it. Just go squish some paint and see what you get.

No, I want to talk about the process of designing a collage. The thing with dendritic prints, similar to inkblots, is you will see in them whatever your mind creates. I typically see landscapes, so go psychoanalyze that. The point is images emerge, and the artist will build upon them.

So I focused on this print and thought, “It’s a forest. A deep, dark forest. Who will I meet there? What action will I witness?”

Scenes began to coalesce in my imagination, and I hit my clippings files to find figures and objects to play the parts.

Unfortunately, all the images that would work are also black and white and tend to disappear on this background. Adding color masks didn’t work.

I need an image in color or which can be colored. Something in the right mood. I have this one image from a Victorian Christmas decoration. It’s about two inches high, a little girl holding a miniature Christmas tree that would be perfect for what’s in my head.

This kid has been haunting my studio for nearly ten years. Clipped ages ago but never quite fitting into a scene, she’s constantly fluttering about, in the way, falling out of every stack of papers I pick up.

Wouldn’t you know, today I can’t find her.

Obviously, I went first to where I thought I’d last seen her.

Then I checked a succession of places she could likely be.

Then I went back into the files on the off chance I had inadvertently put her away where she belongs.

By that point, I was pretty well cursing her, her damned tree, and the entire Victorian era straight to the Devil, and considering stopping everything to completely reorganize all my collage clippings. Maybe my whole studio into the bargain.

Then I got called for tea, and I realized it will soon be dinner time, and I have other things to do.

Still haven’t found the papery little pest. The cat better have eaten her, that’s all I can say.

This is the life of a creative. The prints came out well, though.