This is What Runs in Our Family

Warning: One house isn’t big enough for 3 collage artists.

All forms of record keeping interest me. Since receiving my first “Dear Diary” when I was 10 years old, I’ve gone on to keep photo albums, dream journals, baby books, and scrapbooks.

I’ve always enjoyed making collages, but when my Asheville potter son, Josh, began doing collage journals about 6 years ago, he inspired me to a new level.

Josh has been a mad artist since the time he could hold a crayon. His collage journals have gotten so extensive that he has had to hire someone to design books that expand with use, in order to hold all the pages of his prolific and multi-media art, which on any given day might include a fortune cookie fortune, paint, photographs of photographs, receipts, or pieces of mail.

I made my first collage journal when I turned 50 as a way to consolidate a visual review of my first 50 years. Not long after that my husband made one of his own as part of an assignment for his masters in counseling program.

Now were all hooked, but Josh more than the rest of us. In his studio warehouse apartment, he has 4 desks to accommodate his art. When visiting us in Virginia, he's been known to pick us his journal and start collaging whenever the muse strikes him. When he leaves, there are always traces of his art making left behind. Besides various scraps and interesting scraps of paper, fabric or cardboard on our floors, there are drops of frozen clear epoxy on our cellar floor, and a yellow outline on our back doorstep of something Josh spray painted last year.

Photos: Me, Joe, and Josh. Notice that I am the messiest of the group. I hope to post a few pages of each of our journals in a future entry. This was originally posted on looseleafnotes.com on April 23, 2006.