I’m not sure what came first: my love of squares, or my love of collage.
While doodling up ideas for a logo, I sketched out small (roughly 1 cm x 1 cm) squares, and colored them in with bright primary and pastel colors. As I drew, It became important to me that the squares were not perfect, that their edges were irregular, that the squares were not all identical in size. I didn’t like how the design looked when I took photos of it for use online and in letterhead, so I designed a graphic version and have been using it ever since.
When she was still a toddler, my daughter could become absorbed in cutting out images from magazines and pasting them on the sides of boxes, slap-dash, willy-nilly. I added to this, carving out bodies from clothing catalogues or bits of text from unread copies of The New Yorker. I think she may have gotten the idea of collage from her Primary classroom at a Montessori school, where collage was one of many artistic endeavors encouraged by the teachers. Once when I observed my daughter’s class, I watched the teacher cut up bright squares of tissue paper, card stock, and construction paper for the use of the students, and it might have been the materials, including these squares, that came home with Nola during the pandemic, that inspired my first mosaic collage.
The squares are still about 1 cm x 1 cm, and they are still irregular. Sometimes I map out designs so that the patterns, at least, are recognizable, identifiable, but mostly I like to create an image from a variety of colors, textures, and prints. I love the combination of mosaic and collage that appears, and the careful but also happenstance appearance of the squares, which I cut freehand and glue as I go.
As my house slowly fills with square collage artwork, I wonder at its purpose, or my intent in creating it. I write stories with the hope that they will someday be published, but mosaic collage is for me. It is done in the minutes between activities, at night in front of the television. It is a break from writing while also providing an injection of creativity. It is caps-lock ART and it is the whimsy of a three year-old.
Mostly, it makes me happy. May my eyesight and my Mod Podge last until my final days.