I started making new collages several weeks ago. Now that my quarter of teaching at RIT is over, I finally have the spare time and energy to do so. It feels good. Images will be coming soon.

And, in many ways, I’m returning to image making with fresh eyes. Sure, the main focus of my work has not changed much since my thesis work several years ago, but I have learned much about art and also myself in even just the past few months.

Trust has always been a struggle. Granted, it’s never taken me long to complete a collage. Sometimes a few hours, sometimes over a week. There is no special technique or skill required to create them. But for even such small, simple works the process is daunting because all collage is, at its core, about destruction—the wholesale slaughter of images.

Here I have a magazine image. It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. That’s why I harvested it from my pile of magazines in the first place. Do I use this? Do I slice it up? What if I make the wrong cuts? Do I paste it down? What if it’s in the wrong place? Do I color over it? Anything I do to it could ruin it forever, this small piece of perfection. It’s too good to use. It’s too good not to use.

Here I have a collage. It has some interesting things happening, small places of perfection amongst the whole. I fall in love with these elements. How could I cover them up or change them in any way? But the collage itself isn’t finished. It’s boring. I can’t leave it there.

But in order to continue I must destroy what I’ve already done. I have to hack away and bury the things I love with the hope that something new and better will come of it by the end. The prospect is frightening.

Collage is inherently about loss. I feel sadness and doubt with every action as I am always finding something new to love, a little zone of comfort and happiness within the image and then am forced to ruin it forever with only the vaguest of notions that something better is out there.

Art is a lot like life.

No, I did not just cuss on live internet.

I’d never heard of Polyvore until I noticed today that I’d received a couple of hits from the site. I followed the link to find a Flickr-like looking site with this image:

Liz by AlexWriterGirl featuring Monsoon

What’s that in the upper right hand corner? I made that! Those are my “wall of polaroids” that I made as a mock-up for potential thesis show installations.

The central concept of Polyvore is pretty cool… images from around the web are gathered and collaged together. I’m all for that. What I dislike is the strong fashion aspect with all the clothes and things. It even lists the prices of the things used in each collage with links to the sites where you can go buy everything. So what could be a site for cool mashups from things around the internet ends up looking more like fancy shopping lists. Ugh.