It's unclear if this project started with an abstract canvas mass-produced for people with no taste or with a gigantic frame. The frame came first, and the canvas I bought for another project. I quickly recognized that it was large enough to pair with the frame, which I had to buy because it was on sale for $10 at a thrift store, and I never bypass a good deal. My initial takeaway from the canvas, when I imagined how I would re-work it, was to turn the gold streak in the middle of it into a river leading from someplace beautiful to someplace dark. Then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my assessment of what qualified as beautiful and dark was tainted by society's standards for beauty. Sometimes, the thing that looks beautiful has a dark undertow. Other times, the thing that appears dark in nature can produce strains of beauty not found elsewhere. So, I reshuffled my thoughts. After all, how often have we forgiven something beautiful for its flaws but held grudges against the flaws of something that wasn't beautiful?

I had to trim down the canvas to fit the frame. I left a bit of a lip around the edges when I did that. To some degree, that was wise because I didn't want to cut away too little of the canvas. Looking back, I can tell you that it was unwise to keep the lip after cutting out the base for the project. I should have placed the foam board over it and trimmed it down to size. I ended up having to do that part on the backend. Luckily, everything turned out OK, but now I recognize that the decision wasn't smart.

The first thing I added to the project was a photo that Ulysses Muñoz took of the Monument Lighting, which is a beautiful event held in the heart of one of Baltimore's oldest neighborhoods every year. He sent me the jpeg and I had Walgreens produce a 16x20 print. I knew I wanted to prioritize the gold streak in the middle of the canvas, so that meant cutting up the photo. I knew I wanted the end result to look almost liquid-like, and that meant cutting up the photo in a way that made it appear as though the monument was reflected in a puddle. I intended to fill the top part of the collage with monument festivities and then fill in the bottom with vacant houses along with other parts of the city that people don't typically see. I wanted to show that those two environments live symbiotically, with one feeding the other or feeding off the other.

My approach to the collage changed not long after I started working on the top third of the canvas, though. I had gone to a thrift store looking for salvageable frames and came across a small mass-produced canvas painting of a young woman surrounded by flowers. I bought it because it was only $0.99. The female depicted on the canvas looked serene, and it made me think of a mural I'd seen at the intersection of Greenmount Avenue and 27th Street that says: Long live the rose that grew from concrete. The Rose That Grew from Concrete is the name of a book written by Tupac Shakur, who once lived in a house maybe 10 blocks north of the mural. Also, it's the name of a poem in the book.

"Did u hear about the rose that grew from a crack
in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong it learned 2 walk
without having feet
Funny it seems but by keeping its dreams
it learned 2 breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else even cared!"

The poem is about blooming in a place that is believed to not be fruitful. I decided to factor that into my project.

Unfortunately, I got it in my head that I needed to omit just about all of the white space in the canvas, and that was a large amount of white space. I bought all of the black marble paper and gray marble paper that Plaza Artist Materials & Picture Framing had on hand. I paid for it with the gift card my ex-boyfriend gave me for my birthday. I figured I wouldn't need that much paper, but also, I liked it enough to buy all of it. I spent a lot of time cutting out paper to fill the spaces around the gold streak, allowing some room for error due to the "I don't know why these are here" fake paint ridges in the canvas. It...was not a good time. After that, I started cutting out pages of a book about the Hubble Telescope and stellar evolution to make swirls that vaguely depicted smoke swirls in the sky created in the aftermath of a fireworks show. I layered those swirls on top of my favorite shiny blue paper because I like the way it caught the light.

I had expected to use a similar shiny gold paper as the base layer for the bits of cut-apart photograph bits in the collage. The more I looked at the paper, though, the more that paper seemed to be too basic. So, instead, I pulled out the remaining pages of stellar evolution and used that as the base layer. Then, I turned my attention to the remaining white space and filled it with a beautiful blue marble paper that could barely be seen in the finished product. I had wanted to create a rose bush and have the young woman blooming among the roses, with the roses created out of pictures of vacant houses. It turns out that was a bit overly ambitious and I wasn't capable of making those types of roses. I ended up harvesting pictures of roses from the gardening books I'd bought at a thrift store. I learned about rose trees from those books, which looked easier to make than rose bushes. Since my collage wasn't exactly based on reality, I felt there was no harm in creating an abstract rose tree with a nebula for its base. When I added the young woman to the tree, I realized that I hated the fake flowers that surrounded her. I chose to cover up the fake flowers with some of the flowers that I found in the gardening books.

The downside to collage projects is that they have no depth without layering. The bigger the project, the more the layers. This was the biggest project I'd ever worked on. So, it seemed like it took forever to make sure most things had two or three layers from different, papers, book pages, and faux canvas paintings. "Hours" is an inadequate description for the amount of time required. It was more like weeks.

I was determined to add vacant houses to my project. It's easy to see the city one way when you haven't experienced it the other way, and the endless rows of vacant houses are just as much a part of it as its festivals. This rose that grew from concrete had to survive things—ugly things that are often depicted in movies and novels by people who didn't live through them. She would be no stranger to crime scenes, to loss, to losing friends to the streets, to losing family to the streets. I chose two colorful pictures of crime scenes to place around the rose tree to show that the young woman didn't just survive economic circumstances and bad experiences, she survived what she saw. I had to cut up one of the pictures and fit it around the fake "why are these paint ridges here who did this ish" ridges.

Every collage is like a puzzle. Only instead of trying to replicate a known object, I'm trying to piece together an unknown outcome. I have a lot of struggles with every project, and I enjoy that process enough to endure them.

I went through many books looking for the right colors to add to the collage. I cut up one of Saturn's moons. I cut up the water surrounding the dolphins in some guy's painting. I cut out stars and leaves. It was a bigger undertaking than I thought it would be. Even at the end, when I was finished with the collage, I wasn't finished with the project. I didn't want a generic frame. I wanted to make it stand out like some of the other frames I'd altered to complement my collages. So, I bought $40 worth of paint, gold leaf, and silver leaf, and I hated myself for it. One of my many issues is that I can't stop myself from putting extra effort into something. The flip side is that if I don't care about something, I cannot be convinced to put effort into it. The switch is on or off. There is no halfway. I either care too much or not at all.

In this collage, you will find part of a book page ripped out of Journeying by Claudio Magris. I felt like it depicted how people sometimes experience Baltimore: unaware of how much they don't know about the city that surrounds them, the hazards it holds, and the hope it offers.

"Every journey involves a similar experience, more or less: someone or something that seemed close and well known proves to be foreign and indecipherable, or an individual, a landscape, a culture that we considered different and alien is shown to be kindred and related."