After finishing a Christmas collage project for my boyfriend, I started fudging around with the scrap remnants of what once was a large sheet of black marble paper. Then, I started cutting out daffodils from all the gardening books I bought for the flowers they contained and fudged around with those, too. I could see a sea of darkness peppered with the hopes of spring, which is what I wanted to convey in my initial collage about West Baltimore, but I failed to achieve that goal and moved in another direction. Other elements I wanted to include were the seagulls that fly around the trash that people tend to dump in that part of town. I wanted to be able to cut seagulls out of a painting since there are so many boring paintings of the ocean. I couldn't find any, though, and was forced to make my own seagulls.
I don't know why I went down the Starry Night Van Gogh path. I think that's something I copied from a previous project that had a Day of the Dead theme. It was just an easy path to take. I'm against "what comes easy" when people apply that philosophy to their lives, but I'm all for it when it comes to art projects. It started with a pattern that I made around each seagull to indicate the presence of wind. I transfered that pattern onto some decopauge paper I had bought for the sea dragon project. At first, I thought I'd made a mistake. The color of the paper I chose did not fit well the other objects in the collage. I kept working with it, though. That's life. You don't always get what you want. Sometimes, you just get what you can work with. So, I tried to work with my decision by weaving in swirls I'd cut out of a geology book. I butchered a "I have bad taste" painting of sailboats I bought for $3 at a thrift store, too. Then, I took a few pictures of the City of Baltimore trash can in my backyard and threw that in, too.
It's weird to miss something that didn't always treat you well. I have feelings for West Baltimore that seem to be similar to the feelings I've seen other females have toward questionable boyfriends. Yes, it was hard, but the good memories overshadow the bad ones. It's easy to forget the days without a stove or without a refrigerator; the nights without electricity and the occasional tripped circuit breaker that cut off heating during the freezing cold slip the mind, too. The roaches. The rat. The lack of insulation in the bathroom. The vacant houses. The occasional sound of gunfire. I walked all over the city’s westside during the pandemic. There was nothing else to do, and I had to get exercise. I explored the alleyways, took pictures of trash, and harvested door pulls from discarded furniture. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. More importantly, I got to see West Baltimore for what it was, and not for what other people wanted me to see it as.
That's the problem with being human. We all want the person we are trying to connect with to see things the way that we see them. I am guilty of this. You are guilty of this, too. In pretty severe cases, when the perspective is rejected, the person trying to enforce the perspective demonizes the individual who won't embrace it. In some cases, they try to convince those around them to dislike or ostracize that person until they see "the way." History shows that all manner of atrocities are possible when a person like that feels empowered. Genocide. Concentration camps. Witch hunts. It's wild how many people would prefer to demonize someone else rather than to just let them see things through another lens. People have literally died on the other end of that behavior.