Love in Broad Strokes and Details

Love is recognized in its broadest strokes. Dates, flowers, chocolates, and all the other things in romantic movies. True connection and deep love is in the details. A person making a cup of coffee for you, saving the last piece of chocolate for you, teaching you how to fix something or sharing a moment are the details of love. Inside jokes, things that go wrong become stories of a lifetime. Surprises are our richest treasures.

Art to me is no different. There is the broad stroke art. Choosing the paper, cutting shapes to make an image that wasn’t there before. There are the details of art, textures, using your hands to place and arrange images. There are happy mistakes and those you learn from. Later photographing a piece and changing it in digital programs to make it ready for prints becomes yet another stage.

Art enhances your connections to the world, to those you love and to form new connections to those who will only know you through your art. It is a shared cup of coffee or a snapshot in time depending on who is viewing it.

Everyone felt the isolation of 2020 because of covid. For some it was the freedom of dropping the facade, put up for work and the outside world. Others found it like a cage, unable to see family and friends, unable to explore museums and get art supplies. In art there are always moments of freedom and aloneness. From both you reap rewards.

When I am making a collage the first stages of cutting are broad strokes of freedom. There is a joy and exhilaration of discovering what may work with an idea or what may come out of the material itself. Tools help keep this flow running and before long you come to a place where you can reflect. Taking pictures and adjusting the images for print becomes a deep reflection and meditation. It relieves stress. Looking at each pixel. Seeing the cuts of the paper and looking at where and how it would look in a print instead of in the textured and layered original. When the layers of a collage become a single layer for a print the feel and story changes.

It is easy to get lost in the details and there is great joy in telling stories. Stories that sometimes tell themselves. The surprise in creating art is the impact that you create in an image often isn't what was originally intended. The gold of a paper that was meant to reflect scales of a fish instead become flashes of light that speaks more to the grandness and movement of the ocean that surrounds the fish. Small snippets of paper become intricate threads of detail, intertwining natural with urban elements, weaving a story that many city dwellers see on a daily basis. Puffs of smoke mirror the nature that surrounds it making outlines of pigeons in the sky. Yet as every artist knows, simple lines often have the most work, like the texture of the back of a crocodile where the image itself looks like a part of a story in a children’s book.

Art can transport you into the past. It can very much be an emotion in the present and even transporting you into another world that you never knew existed that only becomes available through art.

For me, creating does all this at once. It brings me both the broad strokes and the fine details of love. Creating art connects me to my past, to my current life, to people I love and have loved and will love. It also reaches me out to the future. It connects me to different people all over the world. My art may mean different things to different people but there are connecting threads. We all share stories in our art. Others see the art as a reflection of their stories. What starts with a simple clip of the scissors becomes a much larger tapestry of emotion and connection. Connection all humans need.