You may notice that I skip around a bit in my blog posts.  Events won’t necessarily be going in chronological order. The way I’m writing my posts is not all that different from my collage-making process.

I started doing collage when I was learning how to paint. I was exasperated because the paint colors I mixed came out muddy and muted instead of bright and clear. My painting teacher suggested I try collage.

Making a collage gives me the chance to “paint” a picture using bits and pieces of color and pattern that already exist – I pick the pieces up, sort them out, and put them together like a puzzle. It’s a searching and discovering way of doing art and similar to my approach to writing “On Whirlwind Hill.”

Pile of collage scraps

I have most of the scraps – the pieces of history, the photos, the journals, etc. I’d like to come upon more. I hope I do.

I’ll put the scraps out there for all of you to see. They won’t necessarily be in an orderly timeline, nor will I use every bit of information I have, but by the end of the year I hope there will be some kind of “big picture.” For me the fun is in the finding-out and in the deciding what pieces to put where.

A Sunny Day on Whirlwind Hill, Carol Crump Bryner, collage, 2014

On Monday: The House