Walk the Book

I had the luck to buy an interesting ‘coloring book’, obviously published by some graffiti enthusiast. I was not able to contact either the author or publisher to check credits for this. Companies were transforming and closing. So I am leaving it like this, no references to sources. But it was inspiring for me as a collage artist to walk through these photographed backyards and give them new meaning and new context, and express my thoughts and feelings.

It was called Street Book ‘Writers Walk’, Now it is Maja’s Street Walk.

I was working on it from time to time starting with 2019 and ended up in May 2023.

Pictures are not small but very long, real city prospects of a modern kind. Maybe it is interesting to see this time what are the emotions behind these works.

I will start with one called Chance. As I see it, every new visual input may be the chance to learn, enjoy, or change it your way. Chance is something you can take, or not. It is a gift, you are allowed not to accept, no one will be insulted. But it is also one door to the world that you may open to get your life be more rich, more like you want to have it.

I will not show you all the pictures I made or recreated, but some.

The next one is called ‘Good’. In May 2023, the good color for me was orange. It was good traveling by local train from the suburb to the city (you can see a round building on it, looking like my train station), since all other means of public transportation were chaotic due to reconstruction work. It was good having time to visit a baroque castle with my niece, it was a time when I had a lot of tasty dinners in good company, so that’s why this one is called ‘Good’.

The next one is about conquest (Eroberung), here beautiful nature is trying to conquer the gray landscape of the suburb. The sky is already very successful in it, views to old villages in Istria (my favorite Croatian landscape), are opening, the city is changing its look. Even the block of flats could not resist.

I love this absurd creature, the giraffe. It is perfectly adapted to the area where it lives, it can feed on high trees, it even has a special mechanism in its throat to be able to drink with its long neck. I spent some time drawing giraffes, and I wanted to have them here in ‘My City’, forever (immer). And of course, I am aware of the fact that this highly specialized creature is not very much adapted to changes, and I am afraid that we can lose it. That’s why I wrote ‘forever’ with a ‘.’, to give it even more weight. May luck stay with you, giraffe

Some things are more intuitive, like this one. Concrete pyramid in the background, reminding us of the Mayan pyramids in Mexico, concrete wall in the front, everything so rational… It was necessary to contradict. So there is a great jungle plant filling the whole sky, and there is a small mythical creature greeting you. That’s what helps to survive all the necessary rationality.

Autobiographical, that’s what all the book of collage work is. Also, in my opinion, a lot of modern art is autobiographical. And this special collage captures on one hand the spring green that entered my life in those days, and also some other pictures I was looking at, that made me feel like a new year and new life is coming up. It maybe transports some of this spirit of optimism I also had thinking about chance, or not. It is up to you to judge.

This is the last picture in the book. It says ‘travel further’. It gives some hints on how and where. It gives me some energy. It is about traveling in time, in pictures, in feelings, and in my mind. It could be good, it could be difficult, but there is energy in it.

This was not the first time that I used provided material, and transformed it in my way. See my posting on transforming an old calendar. The difference is that this time the book on which I worked was made to be transformed and inspiring. But it took me some time to understand that this is an exercise book for Graffiti Sprayers more or less. Still, its spirit of challenge was so present, I could not avoid buying it.

As I am tagging this posting with art therapy, I want to once more underline how important it is for me, and may get for you, to give expression to your feelings and thoughts with means of art. I wish that this posting again gives my readers inspiration and courage to start creating their own pictorial world, which would enable them to create also their own world around them in ‘real life’.