The Touchonian
by Cecil Touchon
Les Jones at Contemporary Collage Magazine has generously offered me the opportunity to share short articles with you, my fellow collagists. These articles are from my daily journal. I post them to my own newsletter The Touchonian in their raw journal form and have tightened them up here with collage artists in mind. Eventually I am hoping to publish this material in a book based on the concept of ‘The Creative Lifestyle for Artists’.
Anybody can glue two pieces of paper together and call it a collage and it is and it might even be amazing. But as collage artists develop there are a lot of other things to think about and grapple with and most of them have to do with the practicalities of the artist’s daily life, how our time is spent, how we find provision for our creative journey, how we navigate our life circumstances and relationships with others and the world and what is happening in our minds and hearts.
Those will be the main subjects of this year’s articles. How we build a solid foundation within ourselves for our creative lifestyle that will insure our ongoing development and the fulfilment of our creative aspirations over a lifetime. I have been making a collage every three days on average for 40 years. I want to share with you some of what I have learned in that time. I will leave you with a brief overview…
A Bullet Point Map to Developing your Creative Lifestyle
Define your artistic drive and interest.
Recognise that you are a creative person and working on your creative projects is a priority in your life.
Decide to design your life around your creative interests. Not the other way around.
Start and keep a daily journal even if it is minimal. The important part is daily even if it is just to sign in to leave a record that you showed up like a punch card at a factory. If you happen to write something, all the better, eventually you will.
Dedicate and budget your time on a daily or weekly basis to working, practicing, developing, planning, studying, mastering, contemplating, dreaming, imagining.
Establish dedicated studio/workspace even if just a tabletop, desk or easel at the beginning.
Make the commitment through practice of showing up to work. Preferably every day even if only for 10 minutes.
Build the habit of working until it is second nature and you are confident that it can be maintained no matter what.
Discipline yourself to organise and document your creative efforts as you go along.
Resolve to build your creative life for a lifetime as if it is one single ongoing work of art. Your archive in its totality: your art, thoughts, stories, journals, documentation, interactions, exhibitions, etc. is your Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of artwork). Make it as rich in detail as possible.
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