“You’re painting now?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m just playing,” I answered.
Confession: I’m always playing. I can’t imagine what else art is about. Unlike writing, creating art has no rules for me. I don’t need to be wedded to the meanings of words and to join them in a way that guarantees a certain understanding. A collage artist uses the language of scraps and fragments, remnants of another life. I empty out bags of paper and cloth onto the floor. I pick and poke, rummaging through the pile. I fray and tear, layer and shift, staple and nail and glue, all the while moving as if I’m in the midst of a wild new dance with no preordained steps.
Usually by the time I present my artwork to the world, the paint that’s always there is almost invisible: It fades into the background or shimmers up through all the other layers I have laid over it
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But, nope, that’s not me. Mostly, I think of myself as a hunter/gatherer.
Only a few hours ago, I was sitting in what always feels like a tiny yard, a strip of grass with two maple trees, one red and one green, on the side of my apartment building, dusting off the wispy down from the feathers of a dead osprey I found on the side of a woods road.
My harvestings are usually more common. I’m the one you might see stopping on my walks to pick up pigeon feathers from the sidewalk, or in an empty lot on Curve Street snipping Queen Anne’s lace, or maybe the leaves of something I can’t identify or ferns (this time of the year, with fat spores on the undersides) to press between newspapers.
I can’t wait to see how these osprey feathers will choose to lay themselves out, what else they’ll mate with—the handful of indigo-dyed wool, wire, some golden-hued Thai silk, ink and paint, a photograph, maybe sandpaper, or the dried and flattened Queen Anne’s lace.
When I am done, you may see only a little collage—the union of disparate things. What I will see is a collage filled with places and sounds, smells and textures—and, always, people. Whole worlds are embedded in each piece.
I want you to know that the way I am now laying down paint on the canvas I bought this very morning comes from a little girl who turns two this week; her tool of application is always a paper towel. And everything else comes from an “extraordinarily unconfused” friend who worked with iron and rode Harleys, and knew that without risks and explorations, we never know who we really are.
Tonight, I am playing over my new canvas with a paint-dipped paper towel in one hand and chips of rusted iron in the other.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work is included in the new anthology The Other Side of Sorrow, published by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.
