Found Images and Text

You come upon a fragment from a photograph, perhaps a relatively small, unimportant section. It evokes thought and feelings for you. You slice it out with your ex-acto knife, sit with it in front of you and let that fragmentary image move your awareness in a number of different directions. Maybe, right then, your mind courses and leaps about, makes all kinds of connections. Before you know it, your awareness of time passing disappears and you have sat, contemplating a series of unrelated ideas. You are, right then, undecided as to where you want to let this image take you, how you might want to incorporate it into your daily practice. So, you file it away, maybe in your sketchbook or daily journal. From time to time as you open these storehouses of your ideas drawings and scraps of image you pass by this image and it arrests your attention.

Later, this bit of visual stimulus lies on your awareness like a burr does on pant legs. You decide to pull it out and deal with it. Often you have formed other connections with this image as you've gone about daily life's doings. Submerged below your consciousness threshold, this image has been doing it's work and idea presents itself almost fully formed.

That is what happened with this little study. I found the cloud image in an advertisement in a magazine and cut it out. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it, and interleaved it in my journal pages. One day on a particularly glorious Spring day the cloud formations caught my attention and I mused on them. It occurred to me that on such a day is when ,everywhere in the world people like to sit and share conversation and pleasure in the day. I wrote down my thought in simple form in my journal. It occurred to me that I had a picture of clouds that might be appropriate to accompany the sentiment. I incorporated a Hungarian translation to suggest universality.

Materials - colour xerox enlargement of a 2" by 4" advertisement fragment. Text - liquid white-out and felt pen.