Origin of Death of a Lie

Anyway, it was a great purchase.

On Saturday, I went to Highlandtown to get pictures of that one mural by the grocery store. I imagined the horses dancing in the sky above the Day of the Dead lady. I don't know why other than I'm sick of that observatory showing up everywhere like it's the mayor of Patterson Park. I did not size the prints right, though. They were too big to pair with the lady. So, I guess she's going to carry that narrative alone. That's OK. I've recently found myself in that same boat. She can do it.

At some point, I bought a commercial art at a thrift store for $3 because the yellow birds appealed to me. As always, I had no idea what I was doing. Eventually, I decided that the commercial birds had to go. Maybe Day of the Dead birds were possible, though. I asked myself what Day of the Dead birds look like and settled on finding the answer in a book about skeletons. First, I had to cut out a bird pattern to properly fill them with an overlay. I used some pages out of a book on national museums to achieve that goal. Then, I did a little layering since I was there, and it was there. I've found it difficult to work on this collage. Turns out, my art projects are fueled by feelings of distress, which I try to manage through creating something. No relationship with a guy who's too busy for a relationship = no manageable depression = no motivation. Now I know.

I fudged around with the collage a bit more and then decided it needed more of an afterlife undertone. Candles from a candlelight vigil. Stuffed animals tied to a street light. Signs of love after death. After all, that's the saddest and most beautiful thing to learn in Baltimore: that love transcends cruelty and the limitations of life. The possible outcome could potentially be upsetting, though. So, I changed direction and chopped up an ammonite fossil. To the average eye, it looks like a random blue and white pattern, but it's one of the oldest symbols of death. It was tedious work, but I wasn't doing anything else with my evening. Plus, the Terminator had just become available on my streaming service. The line "I came across time for you, Sarah," reminded me to reexamine my concept of love/death. It doesn't have to be something recent or even human to have meaning and value. Then, I decided to chop up this terrible wall art I'd purchased for $10 and harvest its gold parts to fill the space at the top of the collage. Basically, I was creating a puzzle in reverse by making the pieces that fit together.

Somewhere during the process, I began to see the light, the dark, and the gray space in which we lie to ourselves in order to embrace reality. I spent whole weekends working on the collage. I found myself using the remnants of some commercial art I cut up for the last collage as filler. There was a lot of gray left, and I wanted to expand on the gray area. Even after I did that, there was so much I didn't like about how things were going. It's easy to feel lost when you don't know where you're going. Some people call it quits and write off their efforts as a bad choice at that point. By then, though, I'd sacrificed a seahorse that was a model for another collage. So, it became less about being lost and more about being unwilling to go back. Unfortunately, I have a few contractor types in my life who push me to hold on to every nail and piece of wood. That's why I have drawers full of screws, nails, and other junk that I don't need because someone else believes I may need it someday. Similarly, and more productively, I hold on to every scrap of canvas just in case I can use it later. So, I started thinking about all the other leftover scraps I had and went into Band-Aid mode.

Over time, the more I stared at the space between the skeletal birds, the more I began to see a reflection rather than a duplication. There weren't two birds, after all. There was just one bird refusing to recognize itself, choosing instead to cling to its warped version of reality. It occurred to me that in this gray space I depicted, this realm between the light and dark where we lie to ourselves about reality, perhaps the biggest lie we like to tell is, "It will be OK." All of a sudden, that one Dave Matthews Band song about "the Space Between" made sense. I always thought it was beautiful. Now, I thought it was deep.

Toward the end, I felt like the collage was missing something. So, I asked my best friend to weigh in on what it needed. To my dismay, she said it needed flowers. I took her suggestion, though, and thought hard about how to integrate flowers in a way that didn't look cheesy. Luckily, there were small flowers in a book I had on a surfer dude in Hawaii who typically painted fish, but sometimes expanded into dancing ladies. Those flowers needed to be layered. So, I looked around and found an appealing range of blue on a fish. I liked the colors and the way the fish looked feathery. That made it easy for me to imagine integrating the flowers into the woman's headdress.There wasn't enough of the blue on the fish, though, so I ended up chopping up this tiger's ears to supplement whatever it was I thought I was doing. I gave some of the flowers black roots to illustrate how beautiful things can come from dark places. Most people like to see life through a lens that allows them to separate the darkness from the light despite the fact that nearly everyone has to make peace with existing in the gray. It's really wild how they paint one another as "good" and "bad." He's not the bad guy. You're not the good guy. We all live in the gray committing selfish actions every day.

The downside to these projects is that even when I'm done with the collage, I still have to alter the frame. I decided to give the frame a partial gold/silver foil perm. I really can't do much until I receive the supplies I ordered for the bottom of the frame. I thought it would be cool to add black flowers to the bottom left corner of the frame, but that turned out to be a bad idea given that the frame had lots of curves. Look, mistakes happen. Bad choices happen. Only someone looking for confirmation bias holds those things against you. After all, everyone has made mistakes and bad choices, and they've forgiven themselves for those shortcomings, too. Don't focus on the mistake/bad choice. Focus on moving on from it. Don't fret over someone who holds it against you, either. That says more about them than it does about you. Just find a way to move forward and learn from what you did. Life tip.

This collage was affixed to its frame earlier this week. It is finished. I brought the piece back to its point of conception on Tuesday afternoon. Someone has already offered to buy Death of a Lie. The end.