Baltimore is a city of murals. Its darkest spaces are often graced with beautiful artwork. They loom over gardens and cover the scarred faces of dilapidated buildings. This is the home of quiet transgressions and the land of brash tactics. Those who live amid the city's hodgepodge of beauty and cruelty are constantly presented with opportunities for growth and change. Their relationship with their environment fluctuates over time, differing from neighborhood to neighborhood and block to block. After all, what a person experiences in Shipley Hill isn't what a person experiences in Bolton Hill. That's what I want to convey in this collage: the contrast between harsh realities and the hope for better circumstances. I didn't start out with that message, and to be honest, I didn't even realize that's the message I was sending until halfway through the collage-making process. I started out with some pictures from the last Day of the Dead festival and the expectation that the collage would go in a completely different direction. The mural of the multi-color horses wasn't meant to be a focal point until it was.
I like having no plan. All of my plans for my life have failed. Even when I got some of the things I wanted, I couldn't keep them. In the end, I've found that it's best to be surprised by the outcome of something than disappointed in it. That's how I approach my collages. I find a frame that I like at a thrift store. I see something that I like in the city. I merge these two things together. I paint a picture with scrap pieces of book pages, commercial art that I have ripped up, and sometimes the craft supplies I've found at the local dollar store.
I had hoped to work the multi-colored horses into some sort of dreamscape background in the collage with the Day of the Dead theme. Then, I decided that I liked the horses so much that I built a separate collage around them. Toward the beginning of this process, I wanted to work on two collages at the same time with the intent of keeping one and parting ways with the other. Turns out I'm a "get obsessed with one thing at one time" type of person. I'm that way with food. I'm that way with my relationships. It's just who I am. So, I quickly veered toward throwing all of my energy and interest behind this one collage. I used some canvas art that someone was selling on Facebook Marketplace as the base for my narrative. Due to the color scheme, I began to see the multi-colored horses as though they were characters in The Last Unicorn, which is an old cartoon about a red bull that drove the unicorns into the sea. The big takeaway from that dinosaur of a movie was that things aren't always what they seem, and love is a pretty powerful weapon.
I started small by putting birds into the sky. I didn't know I was going to build a heaven around them until I did. I didn't know the collage was going to have an ascension theme until it did. I layered. I layered some more. I ripped up a used book about Italian churches. I know some people feel strongly about books. I get all of mine tattered and from thrift stores, though, and I promise that information about Italy is 100% available online. At one point, I dropped the collage and the birds flipped over. That's when I decided that I liked the color scheme on their flip sides better than the ones I'd initially chosen. Hey, people make mistakes. Some folks say it's how you recover from a mistake that defines you. Personally, I think being able to make peace with an unexpected or unwanted outcome says more, though.
The flow of things took a slight turn when I flipped over one of the pages I'd cut up and saw some colorful houses I didn't want to waste. I figured, well, if ascension is a dominant theme in this piece, then dastardly demons have their place in any tale involving heavenly hopes. Then, I added the colorful houses to the grim reality of existence in the bottom right corner. The vacant houses. The difficulties of life. The inner demons that drive a man to make snap decisions while on his way to the Dundalk Walmart. Lastly, I integrated some funny money into the sand and added it to the surrounding frame. I think it supports the underlying theme about the fallacies of man. Also, it's a hat tip to Kerry Livgren, who once pointed out that all we are is dust in the wind, "and all your money won't another minute buy."
I'm calling this collage The Exodus because it's about muddling through the difficulties of East Baltimore in search of exaltation. I really like how the colors came together. As always, none of it was planned. I just pieced it together bit by bit.