Drawing a Vision from Fragments

by Annette Young

As a writer, I've often been praised by friends and family for my creativity. They say things like, "I don't see how you can just sit and fill up a page in minutes," or, "You write such interesting and entertaining letters!" On my best days, I'll eat up these accolades without hesitation. "Yeah, I guess I am a creative person after all," I'll say to myself with pride. However, give me a colored pencil, a crayon, even a paintbrush, and suddenly I feel as left-brained as the most entrenched engineer. I might be able to copy something, but create images of my own? No way. Scares the living beejeezus out of me. Despite this shortcoming (or maybe because of it) I still adore and collect the pictures and artwork of others, and have ached to break out of the writing box into a more visual realm. Recently, I've discovered a delightful hobby that might give me the key to freedom: Collage!

For as long as I can remember, it has been an impossible challenge for me to take an idea and then convert it into an image. It would never turn out how I want. This is why I love collage; it is much more soothing to my perfectionist nature. The selection of the images is entirely out of my control; it's limited to whatever magazines I have and limited further by the photographers/illustrators in those magazines. When I first started making collages, this lack of specificity used to frustrate me: "Why can't I find a picture of a woman sitting at a desk?!" But after awhile, I became much more open to and even elated by the surprises I found. For example, I would have never painted a human head crowned with an organic, open cage that had birds flying out of it, but I found this magazine picture to be the perfect representation of imagination for one of my current projects. In fact, I'm learning that the fewer preconceptions I have, the better. A collage progresses much more easily if I merely keep an abstract theme in my mind and then look at each image in that light.

When I was younger, I was sometimes given collage as a short project in school. We had an hour and a relatively small piece of paper as a canvas, which made everything seem very rushed and too much like work. (Jump, Spot! Jump!) Now that I'm recently unemployed, I've indulged in three pieces of large poster board to delve deeply into each theme. And I'm having a blast! I am allowing myself plenty of time to cull a backlog of magazines, and I'm finding a wealth of images. Not only this, but I am beginning to feel much more comfortable with illustration and photography, and these projects make me feel like a visual artist myself.

On the surface, this sounds like a fun hobby to indulge during unemployment, but it is turning out to have some very practical benefits. It's helping me clean out my old magazines. (My fiancé loves this.) Also, it's got me brainstorming about Christmas: perhaps if I added a little paint, some tissue paper, some other textures, and framed future collages, I could give them as gifts. But the biggest reward comes from the themes I've chosen as my focus—activities I've either wanted to pursue or develop further in my life. I created one collage about a writing career, another about leading a type of intellectual and social salon, and another about singing and playing guitar. As I assembled images and phrases for each theme, an excited energy built up around each one. I've always had a difficult time with visualizing things, whether for art or setting goals, and now I have a vision! Now I can look at each collage whenever I feel down about whichever pursuit and remind myself, "This is why you're doing this. This is what it means to you. So keep at it!"

Annette Young has been the Seattle Writergrrls Web Site Coordinator while working as a writer, researcher and cataloger at the Experience Music Project. Currently living in Vancouver, Washington, she is a contract technical writer for Hewlett Packard and moonlights in her spare time.