​Collage-O-Rama, my largest artist project, opens in a week. Starting in February and hitting a peak in recent weeks, all I seem to talk about is Collage-O-Rama. I am sure that people are tired of hearing about it because a tiny part of me is tired of talking about it. Really what I’m feeling is the need to exit the Collage-O-Rama freeway for a little while to give the brain a break. I knit. I go for long walks or long drives listening to music that leans heavy and metal. I plant seeds for new projects. I started learning to play bridge.

Here are 10 things on my mind that are not directly collage-related.

1

Interior designer Noz Nazawa, who I learned about from watching the Architectural Digest YouTube series that gives 3 designers the same photo of a space to transform. No interiors are actually transformed. What we see as results are fancy renderings, like this one of a luxury loft that made words erupt from my mouth at Noz's window treatments (image is a screenshot from the video).

One of Noz’s most noteworthy portfolio inclusions is the Rainbow House project. There are amazing little surprises and delights in every room but this is the one where my brain could happily melt in a delicious swoon. Seriously.

2

Matthea Harvey’s 2014 book If the Tabloids Are True What Are You? has taken up residence on my bedside table. I have dogeared several poems, but the photo poem Stay is the one I keep going back to. It’s a series of 10 images of figurines and chairs frozen in ice cubes.

I like the interaction with a physical process that can’t be totally controlled. I like imagining someone watching the edges of the ice soften and pull back, snapping photo after photo and then assessing which one best tells the story without fully giving it away. I also like the concept of the book as a whole, the olio of it. I like how visual and literary worlds co-exist so peacefully on its pages.

3

I like collections. Like the collection of bird eggs illustrated in this 1833 book starting on page 26, viewable on Internet Archive. For example:

4

Or this collection of of design and lettering from the Vienna Seccession, one of several art movements that emerged because artists wanted more contact and interaction with ideas outside of insular constraints.

5

I like a good trio of romance novels that share characters and build on each other. Sarah MacLean’s female main characters bring something welcome in the genre. I recently finished listening to The Rules of Scoundrels series which I almost skipped because of its association with the Regency era of British history--I could live the rest of my life never again encountering the words "rake" or "ton"--but I’m glad I didn’t. The final book did not disappoint. Sarah is also co-host of the Fated Mates podcast along with Jen Prokop. (Full disclosure: I've never listened to it because I'm not much of a podcast listener).

6

​Celeste Pewter, who you should look up if you’re not familiar, recently published an essay about being recruited by the CIA. This kind of stuff is my jam. Look, Special Agent Collage Collective, another one of my artist projects, got its name thanks to the many hours I spent in high school churning out spy fiction in the typing room before we got a fancy computer lab.

7

We live with an indoor/outdoor cat who, in his younger years, went on walkabouts so often that we have a permanent Have you seen me? sign with his photo ready to go. The adorable hellbeast has been retrieved from a retreat center more than once as well as a wilderness school where I imagine he was interested in teaching classes. Here’s a story about another adventure-seeker and how the cat's human friend dealt with frequent disappearances. I'll give you a visual hint.

8

The discourse about art and its value and relatedly, art's relationship to artist compensation is an endless, tangled knot that won't be resolved in my lifetime. But I can think about how I participate (or not) in that mess.

An artist I respect retired from studio practice earlier this year and held an open studio day where people could pick out a piece of art that felt meaningful to them. For free.

​Zero Art Fair is “the art fair where all of the artwork is free, with strings attached,” and I recently submitted a collection of work that has been sitting in my studio since it was displayed at a couple of definitely-not-free art fairs.

If art can sell for millions, why can’t it also be free? Or is it only for collection by people with generous margins in their finances? Is an artist's work only meaningful if it sells?

9

Hyperallergic publishes A View from the Easel for artists to share and talk about their workspace. It's curated, of course. There are a lot of pretty studios that read like staged photo ops (like the prominently placed RISD sweatshirt I saw in one studio), but maybe they're not. Perhaps these kinds of features attract artists who maintain an Insta-worthy aesthetic at all times. When I asked if I can be a messy studio influencer, Hyperallergic’s Editor-in-Chief assured me that is the sign of a real studio. I went ahead and submitted as-is evidence the disaster that is my creative haven. Still, I doubt this scene will ever make the cut:

10

A part of me longs to be a printmaker, but my tendencies towards item 9 and my lack of attraction to intricately laborious processes that aren't knitting knowingly override that voice. What I’m really interested in when it comes to printmaking is independent publication and distribution. Here’s a super OG process and yes, I have the reproduction of the 1945 Science Fiction World fanzine where this first appeared.

Also, the same library that scanned the fanzine along with several other issues from that time period also maintains The International Dada Archive which I look forward to exploring in the near future.

Postscript: You may notice that this email didn't come from Substack. Abstract Pancakes will no longer be published there. Newsletter subscribers that find me through Substack are transferred here.