More than two years ago, I started a daily art practice, and after a year of daily watercolor paintings, I switched to daily doodles which quickly morphed into daily collages, and for the past year, I have sat down each day and made a cut paper collage on a piece of 6x8 inch mixed media paper. Even on those rare days when I don’t have the time or energy and can’t make one, I make up for it the next day, and if you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you may have seen some of the collages that I post each day.
Today, I stacked all of them together and the stack was more than fourteen inches tall. It’s such a visual impact to see them all stacked together. It’s one thing to thing about how I made one each day for the last 366 days (it is a Leap Year!). It’s a completely different thing to see the teetering stack of them standing in front of me.
My daily art practice isn’t about making a masterpiece each day, and it’s not about being able to brag about having a daily practice, though it’s good to toot your own horn every now and then. It’s about dedicating the time to create. Sometimes, I love what I make, and other times, what I make just doesn’t work. And out of the 366 pieces that I have made, I would probably say that there’s only a couple dozen that I feel really work. But sitting down everyday and making something with the same materials, pushes me to explore and experiment with themes and and images, and I feel like I have grown so much as an artist over the past year. And I have this bank of ideas for ideas for future work.
I’m just showing up everyday and planting creative seeds and seeing which ones grow.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve had a lot of folks ask me what I planned on doing with them, and many have suggested deploying them and having an exhibit. So, I am pleased to announce that I will display them at the Round Hill Arts Center for the month of May. I am simply going to pin them to the wall, and I am looking forward to seeing all 366 of the collages hanging together.
I’ll share more details in the coming days, and I hope that those of you close to the Northern Virginia area can come see it once the exhibit is hung.
In the meantime, I’ll continue creating and sharing my daily collages, and I look forward to seeing where my ideas and my art take me.