Rainy Morning

I'm less than a week into this project and I'm already being told repeatedly that I'm not asking enough for these daily collages. I've raised the price once, from $20 to $45, and still, I hear the same thing.

I take it as a complement, of course, but I am also giving this criticism serious thought, considering the time it takes to complete each work, materials, my long- and short-term goals. I've consulted Cay Lang. I've browsed ArtBusiness.com. I'm researching what other artists are asking –and getting– for comparable work.

This is what I know so far:

I want to make collages. One every day for at least the next two months. I want to learn something from the process – about myself, about art, about myself making art. I'm already learning. For instance: I've learned that I need to do some critical thinking about how I price my work!

This project is effecting everything in my life. I go to bed curious, wake up excited. Right now, in this moment, I'm already eager to see tomorrow's collage. I have no idea what it will be.

There are underground shifts in my creative life as well. In the week since I began this project, a long-anticipated much-avoided series of shadow box assemblage pieces has finally seen the light of day. For years I've been collecting materials, in turns feeling urgently and forgetting entirely how much I want to make them. And suddenly, in the last two days, four pieces have emerged. Plus, yesterday I submitted one of my short stories to the first of what I'm sure will be a string of literary magazines.

These may seem like baby steps, but to me, they are huge, and just the beginning.

Years ago, I put on a one-woman show: music, video, slides, spoken word, and a gallery show of my art - all of which I had to price. My goal at that point was to pay off the last of my college debt and to free myself of a stockpile of artwork that discouraged me from making anything new. But I worried that selling beloved pieces too cheap might also dampen my enthusiasm. As I agonized over pricing a favorite collage, an artist friend waved off my worry like a stray mosquito. "Just sell it and make another one," he said. "There's no mystery. It's not magic. Just let it go. And make another one."

I struggled for a long time, trying on numbers like high heel shoes - going as high as I dared, which is actually quite low (and true to the metaphor - I never wear heels). In one night, I sold just about everything. People were literally running to claim their purchases before someone else got to them. It was chaos, and such a rush! Between admission to the show and sales of my art, I netted exactly the outstanding balance on my college loans. Maybe I priced too low, but I felt great. And the new pieces I whipped out to restock for the next show were some of my best works of that time.

Yes, I'd like to sell these collages, but not for so little that it hurts to send them off. Twenty dollars, I realize now, isn't enough. Forty-five feels better. Sixty-five would probably feel good, too. It's more in keeping with what I make as a graphic designer, though on the low end of my hourly spectrum – in other words, still humble. But humble feels right. I'm just getting started at this, after all...

I'm clearly not finished thinking about this, nor have I done enough comparison shopping to have an idea what is truly appropriate to the market. Leave room for your star to rise, Lang suggests, and so I will: No price changes today. Forty-five dollars is it.

The humble truth is that I'm having fun making these daily collages. The process is valuable to me even if I don't sell a one, and I'll keep at it as long as this is true. Also, the thought of a growing stack doesn't bother me. It's a body of work, and that, in and of itself, is a valuable thing. I'd love to see a long row of them, all decked out in mats and frames on a nice clean wall. I want a show, is what I'm saying. At that show, after I've breathed a good deep breath surveying my day-after-day labors, make no mistake about it, the not-humble truth is that I'd like to sell every one of them, for enough money to keep the wind in my sails.

After all, the more I sell, the more I'll have to make another one.

Even the Trees Seem Confused

What can I say about today's collage?

Maybe it has something to do with the unseasonably warm weather we've had the last few days: Sixty degrees in mid-January? In Connecticut? That's not right.

Even the trees seem confused, as if stumbling awake in the middle of the night to discover bright blue sky, the full light of day.

Spring is in the air, but it shouldn't be. The earth doesn't want to believe it, and neither do I. But we're all such huge suckers for warmth – it's hard not to enjoy the weather.

It reminds me of how easily I am taken in by a disingenuous smile, a false compliment. I'd like to be more discerning, but would I rather have my guard up? No I would not.

I am relieved. however, that this morning is colder.

Pull up that winter blanket, trees, and go back to sleep.

MA: Loosening Up

Color, line, boldness, hallelujah! Compare this to yesterday and – not to say one is better than the other – but clearly there is change afoot, and a potential new theme emerging in my emerging collage-a-day practice.

I've been saying this for months: I'm interested in exploring and exposing figurative and literal spaces, dreamscapes, the emotional landscapes we feel we inhabit alone, when in fact the terrain is familiar to us all.

So no wonder I'm drawn to playing with maps in my collages. And no surprise I was brought up short in front of a Paula Scher map of Manhattan in my latest perusals of New York galleries. And of course it resonates with me when Julia Cameron suggests (in Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance) that we be honest with ourselves about where we're at, specific about where we're struggling, where we're stuck. "Think of it as putting out your coordinates," she advises. "You want the Universe to help you, and, in order to help you, it needs an accurate account of where you are."

The truth is, I've been stockpiling maps compulsively, with the unspoken hopeful expectation that one day these pages would find their way into my work. "Someday," I am realizing, if I'm willing to take a risk or two, can very easily translate to right now.

Maintenance Schedule

I'm trying it on, this collage-a-day project, and I'm finding it has lessons to teach me. Like, for instance - how am I going to squeeze this into my day? And also: can I let go of the stiff and familiar, to risk making something, god forbid, ugly, or even worse, boring, or worst yet – to use the dreaded art school term – unsuccessful?

Today's collage seems to embody these questions, present these challenges. It tells me: Yes, Amy, this exercise will be good for you. Do it. Practice loosening up. Start putting yourself out there. This will help you quit worrying if your work is good or not, if it's worthy. It'll help you take risks, to follow those giddy impulses – to slop ink all over everything, to introduce ridiculous purple or flashy hot pink – into your typically sober palette. Remember that this project, that this blog– that everything – is for fun, for discovery, that this is what life (and play) is all about.

It'll be interesting to see where this takes me, what my collages will look like two weeks, three months, a year from now. How far can I go with this? Guess I'll buckle in and find out.

Collage-A-Day?

Inspired by Keri Smith's Morning Collages and Randel Plowman's A Collage A Day , I decided to start making collages more regularly myself. I may even do one a day. But I only just started yesterday, and I want to try it on for a while before I make any commitments.

My reticence is not based on lack of enthusiasm, but fear of enthusiasm. Actually, I'm afraid I might go on a collage-making binge.

I made this collage, choosing a color palette without any conscious association, and a random page out of an old dictionary because I got a jolt of pleasure out of the word "dainty" that concluded that page's listings. And then I went out grocery shopping with my husband, and realized I'd picked the exact color palette of the evening: a peachy-pink and blue and green sunset sky, the white and slushy grey, brown, black and piny green along the roadside. I glanced to the right, and found myself staring into a construction site, at a dumpster labeled prominently according to the company that owned it: DAINTY.

I made another collage last night, and another this morning. I might be hooked.

All of these (so far) are works on paper, 8.5" x 5.5" and yes, I'd be happy to sell them! How about $45 each, signed on the back, shipped promptly and for free (to the U.S. anyway)? Email if you want one, we can work out the details.

Collage 2:



Collage 3:

Wow

SOLD
I just noticed I've been receiving comments. I hadn't thought to look for them. I didn't realize people are already peeking under the drop cloths to check out this blog. Not only that, two are asking if and how they might purchase my artwork! Hence the title of this post. And my big smile.

A quick and incomplete answer: yes, it's all for sale. No, I don't have it listed anywhere as such, but I'll get right on that. I'll do some research, find an appropriate venue, or create one. If you have any ideas: I'm open to suggestions!

In the meantime, you eager readers have inspired me to spiff up the joint, and think a little more about where I'm headed with this new venture. I've got ideas. Oh, baby, do I have ideas! And I do plan to get into them. But first things first: I've taken the drop cloths down, swept the debris out of the corners, tacked up some links, slapped up one more coat of fresh white paint. (I've decided I like these white walls. Who needs wallpaper? It seems more appropriate to keep this backdrop fresh and blank as a gallery wall.)

If this were a real space, I'd have snacks set up in the back. Wait a minute - this is virtual reality. There are snacks in the back - little mini sandwiches and cookies and chocolate and champagne and a great big fruit plate (all impeccably delicious and absolutely calorie-free)! Help yourself! Happy New Year! Make yourself at home! Feel free to nose around. Sign the guest book. And welcome to LifeCraft!

Oh, and come back soon. I promise, there will be more.

Thirty-Three Days

Since I'm on a concentric-circle kick, I felt I would be remiss not to include this little experiment developed out of thirty-three days of photographs and journal entries.

I know this is redundant, but I keep thinking about how every moment is framed by moments past; that right now, this instant, how I spend my today, will set the stage for how I experience tomorrow. It sounds like a high-pressure way to be, but it isn't. After all, the more I enjoy today, the more present I am, the more I'll enjoy, or at least be equipped for, tomorrow.

And there's something about expansion from the present, from the core. Something about embracing both past and future at the same time, though I don't have anything articulate to say on that right now. Presence = good. That's all.

Speaking of which, I am enjoying watching my husband make apple-walnut-cinnamon waffles (his specialty), while practicing his golf swing. There are less happy things in the picture, too, which I won't go into right now. But I embrace them as well, and all the more, because they can exist side-by-side with smiling husbands and cinnamon waffles.

Too bad Blogger doesn't host Flash animations (at least not easily). To see this one in action you'll have to go here and be patient while the white space fills: it takes a minute to load. A good opportunity to sit up, perhaps, breathe deep, and take stock of your own present moment?