28 Jan Creating Harmony from Chaos: A Goldfish Collage Story
Exploring intuitive composition with vintage imagery and typewritten text
Sometimes the best art happens when you stop overthinking.
This 20x20cm collage started with no plan—just a pile of vintage goldfish images, an old typewriter, and a blank canvas. I’d been saving those fish for months, drawn to their vibrant coral color and slightly surreal quality. But I never knew what to do with them until I sat down one afternoon and just started playing.
The Process
First came the typing. I loaded paper into my vintage typewriter and let my fingers wander across the keys. Not writing anything meaningful—just creating texture, rhythm, the visual pattern of letters and words. These fragments would become the background, the sea through which my goldfish would swim.
Then the real work began: arranging. This is where collage becomes meditation for me. Moving pieces around, layering them, stepping back, trying again. The goldfish needed to feel like they were swimming, not just pasted. The text needed to create movement without demanding to be read.
Finding Harmony in Color
What unified everything was color. By keeping the palette tight—coral reds, peachy oranges, warm creams, touches of gray—disparate elements found common ground. The vintage fish, the typed words, the painted passages all began to speak the same visual language.
The Joy of Randomness
There’s no deep symbolism here, no hidden message in the text fragments. And that’s exactly the point. Not every piece of art needs to carry heavy meaning. Sometimes beauty lives in pure composition: the way colors interact, how shapes balance, the rhythm of text and image dancing together.
This is the approach I teach in my collage workshops—trusting your eye, embracing intuition, finding harmony without overthinking it.
See It in Person
This piece will be part of my upcoming exhibition next week (details here) and is available for purchase (€60). If you’re drawn to work that celebrates spontaneity and vintage charm, I’d love to see you there.
Want to learn these collage techniques yourself? Check out my upcoming workshops where we explore intuitive composition, working with found imagery, and creating harmony from chaos.