idea book project

I came across this journal yesterday in a bookstore and had to have it for my own.





















I needed a change from all the large paintings and drawings I just finished. Something with a sharper focus.

The left side of this journal is filling up quickly with collages, since I'm doing so many of them now; the right side, poetry, text, odd scraps of conversation I've been collecting.

My [self-imposed] project is easy: make a dictionary of personal symbols. If you had to interpret your life using pictures instead of words, what pictures would you use?

Everyone has a personal symbolism for things. Obviously, the easy ones would be dove = peace, heart = love, airplane = freedom.

Mine would be more abstract: my grandfather gave me two silver dollars before he died. I always pick up my feet a little bit off the floor when the car I'm in travels over a railroad track. I am repulsed by the sight of slugs. I sew without thimbles because the dead, insulated feeling of the metal over my flesh makes me physically ill.

That's a handful of trivia, useless trivia even, yet it's rich in associations. Metal and currency and sharpened needles. Bulging slugs' underbellies melted by salt; earnest unsheathed thumbs pricked to blood by a pin.

Then I cull images and words from magazines and newspapers, looking for pictures that conjure up those words, and others.

Playing with cut out pictures frees me up from the burden of laboriously drawing out what it is I want to see.

I'll post my own results when I get further along in the book's development.

I put this collage in my online store.