01 Apr Three months of collage and more to come
I made it. For the past three months I’ve been doing a daily collage challenge — okay, maybe not strictly daily, but I managed to get 90 collages done.
It was an interesting experiment, and what I learned about myself is that it is actually really hard to stay disciplined and do the work every day.
When I think about it, we do so many things on autopilot — brushing our teeth, making our beds, tidying up — we don’t even think about it. But I don’t think the same is true for art practice, or at least it isn’t for me. Even if you commit to making a collage every day, and it seems like basically the same action repeated, it actually isn’t. For one thing, you have to have your materials ready, and those aren’t the same every day. For another, you have to think about your composition and what the piece will actually look like. So it really can’t be compared to brushing your teeth or making your bed — those actions produce the same outcome every single day, year after year, with nothing new in them. A collage, on the other hand, is a piece of art, an expression of something different every day, and I found that it simply cannot be automated.
What happened is that I sometimes forgot, and sometimes I just didn’t have the time. So on some days I made two or three collages at once — either getting ahead for the days to come, or catching up on the ones I’d missed — to fill the empty pages in the book. Is that cheating? I’m not sure. It probably is, if you think of it as a daily practice. But if you think of it as making 365 collages over the course of a year, it seems perfectly valid.
I decided that the most important thing was not to put too much pressure on myself. So when doing it daily stopped working, I found a workaround — and still made 90 collages in 90 days.
I’m feeling a little proud of myself, actually. It’s the first time I’ve stuck with a self-assigned project for this long.
Another nine months to go. Let’s see what happens.
