I’ve been dabbling with collages for a few years now. It helps me clear my head and express what I can’t with words.
But somewhere down the line, I got stuck. The process of cutting and pasting became too important. I’d wind up crushing a finished collage under the weight of what I expected it to be (that cardinal sin of working for product instead of process). Worse yet, I’d try to say something, a recipe for downright catastrophe.
I started keeping a collage notebook, a place to assemble scraps and place images in juxtaposition. It’s become both a sketchbook (a place to practice) and a prayerbook (a place to offer up whatever I have).
Having a space like this allows me to be terrible, a part of the creative process that’s so often overlooked. We have to allow room to make mistakes, to be bad.
We need to make bad stuff in order to make good stuff.
I heard Robert McKee say once that for every hundred pages you write, you’re lucky if ten of them are readable.
joshua chamberlain 