The three images in this collage with black frames caught my attention while I was waiting in line at my local bakery last week. They had never caught my attention before so I don’t know whether they are new or were always there. The image with the white frame is an acrylic painting that I myself did as a gift for my son many years ago. I had seen a Monet painting called “Garden at Sainte-Adresse” and wanted to try something like it. This is a scaled-down version. Putting the Canadian flag was entirely my idea. I did this because my son was away working in Mexico, and on his return to Canada, this painting was to be his birthday present. He is Canadian.
Doing this painting was fun but since I’m not a trained artist, it required more than just fun to think of doing in the first place and to complete. It required love. The person I was doing this for meant a lot to me. It gave me pleasure and brought meaning to my life to do this. At this time, I was just trying my hand at painting. This is over twelve years ago.
I realize how risque it is to put something home-made alongside other people’s work but since I’m doing the photo collaging here, it’s permissible. I am indulging myself quite a bit here. I simply want to visually and aesthetically enjoy these pictures together. It’s a personal thing and appeals to my senses. At this age and stage of life, it has occured to me that if you don’t do the things that your heart is telling you to, you will never do them.
I like this painting and find it beautiful. I’m making myself very vulnerable here since I’m speaking about something that I created knowing fully well that our perceptions are all different. But this is just what becoming older means. It is about becoming more vulnerable. We can express ourselves more freely – as time and its weathering has given us, and is continually giving us, more opportunities to come “home” to ourselves. I don’t have to pretend that I don’t like my own painting and I can put it with other paintings that I like and photographed at the bakery. “We do well to find out, each day, gradually, what we love; to put in brackets all the prejudices, pressures, opinions, authorities; to let the experience of beauty come to us; and to receive it in all its intensity and truth, without anyone having to tell us what we must like or not; to have the courage to say what touches us – if not to others, at least to ourselves.” (Piero Ferrucci)
It’s important to “win friends and influence people” as Dale Carnegie spoke about in his best-selling book. We don’t want to get on the wrong side of others but we do want to be our own best friend. Enjoy the collage!