The Art Of Avoidance

Steve Goes To Collage

I stumbled onto collage Substack in May and got inspired.

Collage is a hobby I’ve dabbled with since my teens. That’s when I first discovered the joys of making gig flyers and demo covers for my various bands, around the same time a beloved high school drafting teacher put an Exacto knife and T-square in my hands.

In other words, I had motive and means at a young age.

Sporadic, band-related collage was my main focus until my mid-’30s. That’s when babies started appearing in my friend group, so I made a few larger pieces as gifts for these new parents to hang in their nurseries. I also collaged the cover of the second Ken Layne & The Corvids record, Transcontinental. (I was the drummer.)

I got back into collage when our daughter left for college.

I was looking for a way to stay in touch that felt more meaningful than random “Are you still alive?” texts, so I handcrafted postcards and mailed them to her dorm throughout freshman year. Unlike the larger nursery collages (and the Transcontinental cover), these were smaller and came together much quicker.

Those postcards are really all that remain of my previous collage work, most of it destroyed—along with the rest of our possessions—in the Eaton Fire. I didn’t start collaging again until I wrote the final post in the “Vodka Sauce” series.

I followed that reimagining of our old house with a poster-sized collage for our younger daughter’s bedroom, and a strange peacock I submitted to a local art show (won’t know if I got in until September; not holding my breath).

In other words, I was primed to tumble down Substack’s collage rabbit hole.

Inspired by the work I saw others sharing on Notes—and impressed by how much cleaner they were than my often chaotic creations—I decided to give smaller pieces another try. My aim was to see if I have any kind of discernible style. (Jury’s still out…)

That was early on a Saturday evening at the start of June. I had completed 3 down-and-dirty collages by the following night.

Whether or not any of them are worth the scavenged/thrift store materials, dollar store glue sticks and poster boards, or the 1-1.5 hours of my time each one takes is up for debate. What matters to me is how good it felt to completely escape into a series of short-term real world projects instead of zoning out to Britbox mysteries or reading the same page of a book over and over. (My attention span has been almost non-existent since the fires, but slowly improving with time.)

“Coulrophobia”

I really like the messiness of collage.

The scraps of paper scattered all over the table and floor; the gummy glue residue on my fingers; and the constant “where the hell did I put the scissors?!” of it all. The whole process, as I approach it, feels tactile and human in a way that a lot of modern life doesn’t.

And then you have a ridiculous postcard-sized object to show for it at the end.

I enjoyed all of it so much, in fact, that I came to the only logical conclusion: I should do one a day in June! So…here we are on the last day of the month, and it’s my birthday to boot (so you’re required to be kind about my manic, monthlong hobby.)

Last year I created a “Double Nickels” playlist that featured one of my favorite songs from every year I’ve been alive. Here’s the track I would likely add for this past year.

---

This year I made 30 collages in June (well, 31…but I kinda hate one of them).

I attempted to articulate what this experience has been like to my wife last week, but couldn’t find the right words:

Me: This whole project has been a really interesting exercise in…um…

Wife: …avoidance?

Readers, that isn’t the word I was groping for (maybe something more along the lines of “distraction”). At first I felt a little defensive about her word choice, but it only took a few minutes to realize she was totally right. I’ve been keeping myself unbelievably busy since getting laid off and losing our home, even as things slowly get better.

Is that healthy? No. Do I pretend it’s healthy? No point. Can I stop? Not so far, at least not without feeling like I’m about to explode (although my family does occasionally catch me staring intently out our fifth floor window into the middle distance, which I’ll count as “dad downtime”).

The apartment complex hot tub helps. Exercise helps. Switching to decaf earlier in the day definitely helps. Insomnia meds help. And for the past 30 days, collaging has helped—even though I had to set an unreasonable goal to get there.

Here are a few of my small June collages: 1. "CCCP"; 2. "The Art Of Avoidance"; 3. "Pound Foolish"; 4. "The Bends"; 5. "Headed Down The Trash Chute"; 6. "Blink"; 7. "Time Scrap Pile"; 8. "Lies Agreed Upon"; 9. "Creating Dark Values."

Somewhere along the way, most likely in my teens, I adopted art (in various forms) as a coping mechanism.

Collage is a fun hobby for me, but still scratches the creative itch that has driven me down various personal and professional paths throughout my life.

And it has been low pressure up until now because very few people see my creations, unlike writing or the various musical groups I’ve been involved with over the years. With this project I decided to push myself by publicly sharing a few of these small collages, although I have no idea what I’ll do with them beyond this post.

Maybe I’ll convince indie pop bands to use them for cover art, con a small local coffee shop into hanging a few up for customers to ignore, mail them to random strangers around the world with Kurt Vonnegut quotes scribbled on the back, or—most likely—turn them into a back-of-the-closet time capsule for our grown children to find when they’re cleaning out my possessions after putting me in an assisted living facility.

Speaking of Vonnegut quotes, this is one that has really stuck with me over the decades. It seems particularly appropriate in this context:

Hope you enjoy this peek inside my manic brain. I’m aiming to make one small collage per week in July. We’ll see what happens after that. So it goes.

---

---

I Used To Pretend Kurt Vonnegut Was My Grandfather

---