Nothing is perfect and that's fucking beautiful/

Cut-and-paste collage is never perfect.

The cuts are rough. Things never line up as perfectly as you want. The paper buckles or wrinkles from the glue (or it is so old to begin with that it crumbles in your fingers).

And no two fragments ever truly go together. 

Human error is a feature (not a bug) of analog collage, because, well, it's made by humans. 

In an age when technology seems to be isolating us more than bringing us together, there's something to be said for embracing tangible, messy, human things. 

A recent episode of Seth Godin's podcast, Akimbo, touches on this idea of quality and imperfection and the concept of six sigma (a set of techniques meant to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability). 

In the show, he basically says that, in many cases, perfect isn’t the point.

"As humans, the six sigma thing can get out of hand. As humans, maybe we have enough of that sort of quality. And there might be a different sort of quality that we seek. This could be the quality of wabi-sabi. Wabi-sabi means 'imperfect, handmade, irreplaceable.' Wabi-sabi tells a story. Wabi-sabi is incomplete. ... the opposite of the six sigma perfection. ... the Kindle may be a fine place to read books, but it has no wabi it has no sabi. It is merely a collection of letters. All the books look the same. Yes, you can carry a thousand books around in your pocket  but all of them are the same. There is no patina. Every book looks and feels the same. You don't remember where you bought that book. You have no recollection of who you lent it to. Who touched it beforehand. There's no coffee stain, or folded pages, or notes in the margin. It's sterile. It's perfect." 

The more I think about what I'm trying to do with collage, what I'm trying to say, the more I believe that nothing is perfect.

And that's fucking beautiful. 

On showing up every day and doing the work/

I've made a commitment to make at least one new collage every day. 

On the surface, making new work on a regular basis sounds like a no brainer. And maybe it is. Or, at least, maybe it should've been more obvious to me that an artist should do one thing:  show up every day and make work. 

But that's not how I approached my work.

I would go long stretches of time creating nothing. My mind was always thinking about collage, but I wasn't carving out the time to do actually do the work.

And when I would finally sit down and start cutting, the output would be incredible (I once made three dozen pieces over the course of four days). It was ridiculous and exhausting--and totally unsustainable. And apparently the wrong way to approach not just art but life. 

When I would finally sit down and start cutting, the output would be incredible, but it was also ridiculous & exhausting—& totally unsustainable.

Recently the swissmiss blog shared a video that paired a talk Simon Sinek gave entitled "Intensity vs Consistency" with the animation of Jocie Juritz. And it's fucking rad. Check it out.

Animation is the process of making small, repetitive, consistent actions, over and over, until you suddenly find you have created something you are proud of. Simon Sinek's wonderful talk for The RSA is about applying that positive attitude to work and life. Client - RSA Narration - Simon Sinek Production - Abi Stephenson Direction / Animation - Jocie Juritz Animation - Emma Ehrling http://www.jociejuritz.co.uk/RSA-Intensity

This, coupled with the idea that quantity (or frequency) often leads to higher quality, especially when it comes to art making, has me doing things differently. 

And so, I'm making new work every day. First thing every day, in fact. 

I wake up at 5 am and start cutting and pasting until at least one collage comes together. And then I start the rest of my day. 

So far, I've made a bunch of pieces that I'm not crazy about. But I've made others I really really like. But the most exciting thing is that the daily ritual is keeping my mind more focused on the craft (and concept) of collage. And I'm starting to see that the pay-off of effort is not about a single day of success, but the success of many days. 

Previously, when my output was sporadic, sure, I thought about collage a lot. But now that I'm actually doing it everyday ... shit, it's all I think about. 

Which is the best possible outcome. 

Always. Be. Cutting./

Always be cutting. Srsly, that's the only rule. 

There are no bad cuts. There are no mistakes. Just keep cutting. Keep making a mess of things. Keep pairing images down. 

Smaller. Stranger. More fragmented. And then wait for something to take shape. 

Now paste.

And repeat.

"All power to the packrats!"

I opt-in to a lot of e-newsletters. Partly out of optimism ("I totally have time to read 1,000 e-newsletters a day!") and partly because I suffer from the hoarding compulsion (more on that below). 

Out of the dozens of e-newsletters that I receive, there are only a handful that I read everyword everytime. One of those is by the writer/artist Austin Kleon, who sends a simple weekly email of 10 Things he thought were worth sharing that week. In his most recent newsletter, he shared his thoughts on the concept of "Tidying Up." 

The long(ish) post is worth a read—and mentions everyone from Marie Kondo to George Carlin—but the part that really landed with me was the section about the "Sassiest Boy in America" Ian Svenonius and the "war on hoarders": 

While I find the Kondo craze mostly benign, I do think there’s something insidious about what Ian Svenonius calls the “war on hoarders,” in which Americans are being convinced to give up all their paper books and CDs and other material clutter and embrace the digital cloud, accessed by sleek machines sold and controlled by powerful corporations.

“ALL POWER TO THE PACKRATS!” Svenonius exclaims in Censorship Now!! He knights hoarders as “the only thing standing between the incomprehensibly rich, all-controlling, degenerate, digital despots and the absolute destruction of any deviant or alternative consciousness.” (Let’s not forget that Winston Smith’s first transgression in 1984 is owning and writing in a paper diary.) If part of the artist’s job is to be that alternate consciousness, then we must keep our weird stuff around — stuff that other people find no value in.

I think a lot about hoarding, because, well, I come from a long line of packrats and hoarders. And collage, by default, requires one to hoard. 

I may not be a candidtate to appear on the TV show Hoarders (yet), but I'm definitely a collector and a clutter-bug. 

If you research hoarding it's often referred to as a mental illness that requires maintenance. I believe collage is a conduit to achieving mental health. So, in a way, my compulsion to collage cancels out my compulsion to collect.

It feels like I'm turning a negative into a positive, like I'm walking the line between collecting and hoarding.  And really, at the end of the day, I find comfort in all my clutter. It's physical evidence of my existence. 

P.S. You can sign up for my e-newsletter below.

There's something cathartic about stripping images down to their simplest forms and then building them back up again.

As I mentioned in my previous post, for me, collage is about making connections.

Usually, that means the connections between two disparate scraps of paper. But more often than not, it's about making deeper connections.

To thoughts or ideas. Or feelings.  

In fact, when I see hundreds of paper fragments spread out on a table out on a table I think, "That's exactly what my brain looks like. A fucking mess with tons a bits of things floating around just waiting to be utilized."

There've been plenty of articles written about creativity and making connections, and even cult leader Steve Jobs once said, "Creativity is just connecting things."

And I believe that to be true.

It is also magic in the way that it can connect the past with the present. 

It's impossible not to feel connected to a bygone era when you spend hours poring over 70-year-old news magazines. Collage is all about recycling, reinterpreting, and reprocessing our collective past, present, and future. 

There's also something cathartic about stripping images down to their simplest forms and then building them back up again.

Collage is a place to put my anxieties and fears, to exercise control over the world itself, and to brush back the overwhelming digital crush of apps and push notifications and social media rants and constant news and updates and marketing messages and images upon images upon images. 

With collage, I'm in control. 
 

The act of collage to me is all about discovery and connection. It's about giving order to a self-created chaos. It's about mental health. 

I've been thinking about this a lot recently. Why I collage.

I'm wrapping up a three month fellowship program and so much of our time has been spent talking and thinking and writing about what we do—and why. 

What I do is easy: I make pictures out of pictures.

The process is even easier:

I cut, paste, and repeat. 

But the why ... that's been more difficult to nail down.

It seems like every week since the fellowship started, I've had a new angle on an artist statement, a new reason why. But in the end, the only thing I know to be true is this: 

The act of collage to me is all about discovery and connection. It's about giving order to a self-created chaos. It's about mental health. 

I don't have a set way that I collage. Every piece is different. I have a few preferences (source material usually predates 1960; a human face is rarely left intact or uncovered; and I always cut, never tear). 

But that's about it. The rest is about feeling my way through each piece, about the simplicity of and a fascination of paper. It's about sorting through scraps and disparate pieces. It's about pushing on that feeling until something new takes shape. 

Sometimes nothing feels right. Sometimes I don't find what I'm looking for (whatever that is). And other times I walk away from my work table with ten newly assembled pieces. 

But it doesn't matter if I make something new, only that I showed up and sorted through the debris. 

The tactile nature of collage, and the process of cutting and pasting, is therapy. 

It's relaxing and it gets me away from a fucking screen and the internet and every other distraction in my life. It's analog and it reclaims a small part of my pre-digital brain. 

Also: I'm a kinetic person who abhors idle hands. I need to be doing—and in doing, I often find connections. To people, to things, to ideas. And, in this case, between fragments. 

Fragments of thoughts.

And various random scraps of paper. 

Let the failing begin.

I feel like I've been working on this web redesign for three years. But the reality is that I've merely been thinking about working on this redesign for that long. 

I've allowed myself to be psyched out by the challenge of creating work worth sharing—and blogging about things that are worth reading. 

I know this is normal. This fear to begin. Because once you begin, you can fail. 

But failing is always better than never beginning. 

So I'm prepared to fail. And fail again. 

Let the failing begin.