I sat down and started cutting straight lines—not perfectly linear, but as straight as my hands could cut. Pulling pages out of magazines and using the colors or designs that spoke to me, the collage took shape line after line, color after color.

I wanted to make a collage using only straight lines. I normally tend toward the round or curved. Straight lines feel constraining. They seem impersonal—direct. That is not my personality—maybe that is why I wanted to try this in a collage. Even so, bits of curves crept into several of the pieces.

A collage is similar to a puzzle—taking shapes and fitting them together. I enjoy the challenge, but it is also difficult in that there is no correct final solution like a puzzle.

This YouTube video shows part of the creation of this collage. The music for the video is a short piano piece from my children’s collection: Ten Pieces for Piano.

---

We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we’ve collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we “are” is simply a finely curated catalog of those.

— Maria Popova (b. 1984) Bulgarian-born, American-based essayist, author, poet, and writer of literary and arts commentary and cultural criticism

---

Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.

— Chuck Palahniuk (b. 1962) American novelist