The Bayeux Tapestry Is Not A Collage

Photo pinched from Peter’s blog

Peter M. Ball has been streamlining book production processes and is bringing some chapbooks into the world as part of the process (if you like following processes, see the Brain Jar newsletter).

I’m in the middle of a lot of big projects lately, and occasionally stalling, so I am currently fascinated by how people can get quickly from an Idea to a Thing, especially when they can reduce it to the minimum number of steps.

I was making some notes on this (I’ll post more about these journals in due course!), thinking about the difference between collage as a metaphor for the process of ideas, and the actual practice of collage, which is a lot more immediate but less universal as an analogy.

Conclusion (apparently): The Bayeux tapestry is not a collage.

I meant to do a collage, because I found some clippings in an old notebook, but I was disgruntled and headachey and didn’t have a glue stick and the a/c was too breezy but I didn’t want to move. So I just took all the bits I was going to use and drew them into a collage.

• Photo of a macaw from an unknown magazine. (I used to live on a street with a vet surgery at the bottom of it; the vet had two macaws he’d bring to work with him. Sometimes I’d see them out on the weekend, eating icecream together. The macaws had blue tongues.)
• Hat from a battered Richard Scarry book (possibly, evidence suggests, Busy, Busy Town).
• Thought balloon from a Judy Horacek cartoon — the only place I can find it online is here. Some of you may know Horacek’s work primarily from (Where is the Green Sheep (written by Mem Fox), the sheep in which have been ranked here: All of the Sheep in My Son’s Picture Book Ranked by How Much I Hate Them.