Living in a Paper Doll World

15.5" x 12.375" Mixed Media Collage

I did this collage to show the struggles and hard work of living life, but it still needed something. As I was going through my stash of collage stuff, I ran across a paper doll that I had printed from Pinterest and it just seemed to fit. It wasn't until several days later, as I was questioning my choice to add it to the picture, that I realized what my subconscious was telling me. Life is a fantasy paper doll world.

I remember when I was younger, how "McCall's" magazine always had a page of paper dolls for kids that I would carefully cut out. I looked forward to each issue eagerly. Those paper dolls spoke of better things to me, happier times, a kinder world. Those paper dolls had an innocence underlined by a subtle direction of thought that guided my young mind.

 This morning I ran across an article about British writer Jeanette Winterson on Maria Popova's Brain Pickings.  The article was titled: "Jeanette Winterson on Time, Languange, Reading, and How Art Creates a Sanctified Space for the Human Spirit," which quotes a book co-authored by Winterton and Canadian broadcaster, Eleanor Wachtel. In it Popova writes:

...Echoing Henry Miller’s memorable assertion that "all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,"  [Winterson] adds:
Art forms must always change… You cannot stop in art, you cannot fossilize art in a redundant form, and you cannot take a point in history and favor it above any other point and say, ah yes, this is the way to do it....Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.

..."the artifice of language and its limitations,"
Yes, it is artificial, but it is, as yet, the best way human beings have found to communicate to one another their deepest, their most difficult, feelings. And that is the preserve of poetry and of true fiction, to put roots down through the surface into the subsoil of the human heart and to draw up those elements that would otherwise lie locked there, unheard, unspoken, perhaps unregarded. Language can do that, and I think that it is the duty of the writer to go on pushing language forward because if it’s not developing, if it’s not growing, if people aren’t using it in unique and different ways while at the same time regarding its tradition, then that language is going to start atrophying.
...For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the words with which to express something, you are no longer incoherent, you are no longer trapped by your own emotions, by your own experiences; you can describe them, you can tell them, you can bring them out of yourself and give them to somebody else. That is an enormously liberating experience, and it worries me that more and more people are learning not to use language; they’re giving in to the banalities of the television media and shrinking their vocabulary, shrinking their own way of using this fabulous tool that human beings have refined over so many centuries into this extremely sensitive instrument. I don’t want to make it crude, I don’t want to make it into shopping-list language, I don’t want to make it into simply an exchange of information: I want to make it into the subtle, emotional, intellectual, freeing thing that it is and that it can be.

 ...[For the artist] it is a question of always going back and uncovering what is already there because the artist is something of a dredger: you have to let down your net and pull up things from the mud, from the silt, that are unrecognizable, that have been forgotten, that have lain disused and ignored for a long time. You bring them up and you clean them off and you look at them and you bring them back into the present where they can speak, where they have a place. I think it’s a dual role of dredging and of cleaning, but then also of re-creating so that you are always offering something that is right for your own time, that is new in itself.

 ...To learn how to heal yourself seems to me to be the most important thing that you can do because at that moment you are genuinely self-reliant, and if other people hurt you — as they will — it won’t matter because you have now in your own hands the tools of healing.

...I can see no reason to be bound by chronological time. As far as we know, the universe is not bound by it; as far as we know, it is yet another construct of ours, this worship of the clock and the idea that there is a past and a present and a future which trot along obediently in line and never swap places. In our own lives we know that that’s not true because human beings seem capable of moving imaginatively, backwards and forwards, of pushing out of the body. I think of it really as an out-of-the-body experience — that’s not something that only shamans and New Age hippies have. It’s something that we all have quite often in our lives. And I wanted to bring that into fiction because it seems to me to be a more honest reality than the rather dull reality of the clock.

...The journey that you make is not one of the clock: it’s an interior one, and in it you travel through time, through space, through place.
 
Winterson's views seemed to fit in with what this picture seems to be saying to me, or more accurately, what my subconscious was trying to say through my art. Words and pictures are intertwined for me and this is expressed in all my collages.

Everything is connected according to current quantum theory. We are what we think. Really. The reality of life begins in the mind, and, as Winterson says:

  "Art can make a difference because it pulls people up short. It says, don’t accept things for their face value; you don’t have to go along with any of this; you can think for yourself."

 I think that is the real message here.