A girl needs a dream

Lately I’ve been having the Laid-Off dream a lot. It’s a pretty common dream theme, like the Naked in Public dream, or the Oh God I’m Pregnant dream, or the I Forgot to Study for the Exam dream, or the I Absolutely Have to Get Somewhere But All the Buses are Going the Wrong Way dream (oh wait, that’s not a dream, that’s OC Transpo reality.)

But the Laid-Off dream has been the one plaguing me lately. Suddenly I’m jobless, which would be okay except for the income-less part, and nobody else will ever hire me and I won’t be able to pay the mortgage and the hounds of Hell will be howling at my door. It usually ends with me waking up and realizing Phew, it was only a dream. But the other night it ended with me actually getting a new job as a cowboy in eastern Nova Scotia. (Nova Scotia I can understand, but I haven’t wanted to be a cowboy since I was nine. Still, I’ll take what I can get.)

The Laid-Off dream, especially when it gets to recurring status, tends to get me thinking about what I would do if I actually did get laid off. I’ve worked for the same employer since 1991. Sometimes I feel that we’ve melded together over the years, like that morbidly obese woman and her couch.

Would I stay in my field, or would I take a stab at something completely different?

I’d love to be an artist. It’s totally impractical, not only because it’s no coincidence that the words ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ so often appear together, but because I possess a truly astonishing lack of artistic talent. The average seven-year-old draws better than I do, and I’m not kidding.

I’d give my right arm eye teeth for artistic talent. I would love to possess that magical ability to draw what I see and create what I imagine.

So I started thinking: surely there are forms of art that don’t require artistic ability, or that at least don’t require any ability to draw or paint or produce anything with any resemblance to anything. I mean really, why should I let my lack of artistic talent stand in the way of my dream of being an artist?

I started looking at various art forms, in the hopes of finding my artistic niche. And I found something! Collage and altered art. You just create new things by combining things that already exist.

Further explorations led me to this: The Collage Machine. I played with it on Sunday afternoon, and look what I made.

Then I got really creative and aged it, just because I know how.

You’d never suspect I have no artistic talent after looking at those, right? And that’s just my very first effort. Soon I’m going to graduate to scissors and paste. (But first I have to glue my table leg back together, so I’ll have a surface to work on. I read somewhere that a working surface is essential to any artist.)

Anyway. I am a researcher at heart, and I’ve really been digging deep on this one. I’ve discovered there’s a whole art form called Altered Books. It’s bizarre, but I love it. You take a hardcover book, glue all the pages together in clumps of ten, then create collage-type art on both sides of each of the resulting ‘boards’. You can combine any kind of materials you like – Scrabble tiles, feathers, photos, words, insects, fabric, anything. Here are some examples.

So. I’m going to be an Altered Book artist, and nobody will ever know I can’t draw (except you, of course). I’m going to start as soon as I fix my table. I might even be so wildly successful at it, I’ll have no choice but to quit my job before they can lay me off.