can't touch the bottom

Collage Paper Playlist 12

love becomes a picture

"Cold Reactor" - Everything Everything

I've been reading Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview. Few creators have spoken to the texture and shape of my soul as consistently as he does. He's made appearances in my writing again and again and again.

In The Last Interview he says, "I'm not interested in doing the same thing even if it worked". I couldn't agree more. That may seem hypocritical considering you're reading what is now the 12th Collage Paper Playlist. But let's also consider Bourdain's primary means of presenting his work to the world was through episodic television. If ever there was a place of immense temptation to be repetitive and formulaic it's in the medium of TV.

Instead, he believed in taking the limitations and restrictions of a recurring travel show and trying to do something different week after week. Tried to make every episode feel like a separate entity than any he had made previously. It's not about thinking outside the box, it's about using the space within it to push the boundaries of what the box can be. It's about finding infinite possibilities within in a finite, four-cornered space.

It's what I call the Kids and Cats Principle. Give a box to a kid or a cat, watch what they do, and you'll never think about thinking 'outside' the box again.

That's what I try my best to do here, and certainly what I tried to do with this piece.

Special thanks to

Mitchell Volk

for unknowingly recommending this song to me.

can't touch the bottom

"Object Permanence" - Arm's Length

One of the ways I keep trying to push the limits of what I can do differently is through type. Varying fonts. Varying sizes. Varying weights. Playing with hierarchy and arrangement. Adding homemade textures on top of it without distorting it beyond readability. You can see it more overtly in the previous piece and perhaps more subtly in this one. In both cases I think it's working, or at least getting closer to something interesting.

The other thing that I'm still struggling with, and have been since the beginning, and perhaps I always will, is the marriage between digital and analog. I'm constantly working on bringing more paper into digital work and how to better make digital type sit well with paper collages. Most days I feel like I'm in over my head and "I can't touch the bottom", but I know somewhere on the other side of it, somewhere underneath is "blue beyond belief".

next to me

"Don't Come Down" - The Maine

My favorite thing about these playlists is that I get a chance to put all teh things I love in one place. Art, books, and music all intermingling in a shared space. I also use it as an engine for music discovery. It gives me an excuse to make time to find new bands and artists to listen to.

But it also gives me the opportunity to return to the musicians and songwriters that I love returning to. "[T]o choose again what we chose before", as David Brooks might say.

The Maine is certainly one of those bands for me. This is the third time they've been featured on the playlist (here and here), and you have

Daniel Barber

to thank for that.

After last week's playlist he mentioned to me that since discovering The Maine here they've become something of a mainstay in his regular music rotation. Someone falling in love with music I've suggested is one of the highest compliments I could ever hope to attain. He asked me to recommend a few lesser-known songs of theirs. Right when I was about to, I decided instead to do it through the playlist. Hope you like it!

beneath the waves (I lost my way)

"Neglect" - Common Wealth

Following a previous playlist

The Sea in Me

sent me a link to a podcast interview with Susan Cain regarding her book Bittersweet. I've had the book in my position for some time. But like most books in my burgeoning Antilibrary, I haven't read it yet.

During the conversation Cain says that "we are creatures who are born to transform pain into beauty". We are characters of contradiction and simultaneity in that way. Supple and barbed. Condemned and redeemed. Broken into wholeness. Stable and trembling. Phosphorescent beings born into an abysmal dark, and not consumed. We shimmer and we glow.

We experience love, joy excitement, exuberance, and elation. But we also experience their fragility. How quickly they succumb to sadness, trauma, loss, and suffering. This is the process of our personing. We are made of it all. Made by it all. And when we can embrace it, we find a "comfort beneath the waves" though "Most would say [we’ve] lost [our] way".

my remedy, your reverie

"Heavenly" - Broadside

Paris Collage Collective

does these great challenges and open calls. They provide you with a picture of some kind and your task, should you choose to accept it, is to use it in a composition. I try to participate from time to time, but I've never met the deadline. I always delude myself into thinking that Ican do more than I can actually do.

Regardless, I still enjoy taking on the challenge, when I eventually have the time to get around to it, if for no other reason than my own personal benefit.

The top half of this piece is one of the provided photos for their Earth Day Open Call. I love the color palette. But I'll admit that when I saw the photo I had no idea what I could possibly do with it.

When I'm feeling uninspired or just to unfocused to work on anything, I look through the MET's online Open Access collection for images that might be useful in future collages. As I've stated time and again, I prefer to do as much as possible on paper, but sometimes it's hard to beat the convenience of digital. I came across the painting used at the bottom of this piece and knew that I had found a way to make the floral image work.

Throw in some homemade gritty textures and some experimental typography and it pretty much made itself.

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That’s it for this week’s playlist. If you have a song you’d like to see on the next one, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Take care.

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