This is what keeps my creative juices flowing. Sallie paints and I scrapbook.
When I was a student at SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design), the first fashion class I took what Introduction to Fashion Design. During the course of the three month class (the school operated on trimesters), I took away two things. One was that English professors, like the one for this class, are smoking hot. Two was that cutting out random shapes from magazines, images that were odd but cool could be created. There was an idea behind nonsensical cutting, the same idea behind Dada and Hannah Hoch.
The Dada movement started at the outbreak on World War II. Dada and the artists associated with the movement believed that logic and reason had cause the war. The held that too much logic, reasoning, and thinking can be negative and that chaos and letting go procreates great ideas and designs. This was at the heart of my professors lesson (what was his name? do you think he’s on LinkedIN?). He wanted us to stop thinking about the design and let the design come to us. He asked that we cut out random shapes from magazines, arrange them together in any way we wanted, and see what we come up with. Surprisingly, I came up with many cool designs that I translated into actual garments.
One of the goals on my list for 2013 was to scrapbook more. Pattern making and sewing can be orderly, a little too orderly at times, and this loosens my tight reigns. It also aligns with another one of my goals this year – to live with less reason and logic and let random create beautiful designs.
