Visual Art Journal – Dayna J Collins

TRACES: My Personal Work

The marriage of paint and collage was much tougher than I imagined. I have been a painter for years, I have been a collagist for even longer, but putting the two together has been a painful labor of love . . . . and finally came together.

I had been moving toward combining paint and collage over the past couple of years, trying to figure out a way of adding paint over collage, and collage over paint, discovering the right balance of revealing and concealing. Adding collage to a board is easy for me, but I never wanted to cover it up with paint. Or I would create a collage, feel brave, add paint, but before I knew it, every bit of the collage was covered up.

My art group, the Band of Artists Collective, has a show opening tonight and I was determined to have my mixed media pieces reflect the successful pairing of collage and paint. I experimented in a small journal, doing quick collages on a series of pages. But I liked the collages and didn’t want to mess them up with paint. Reminding myself that my word for this year is RISK, I spread some paint over a collage. I liked the painting, but the collage was gone. What the hell.

It came time to submit images for our upcoming show. I didn’t have any completed pieces and what if I never found my way to adding paint to collage (or collage to paint). So I submitted photos of two 12×12 inch paintings that were somewhat in the style I hoped to complete, although the work did not have one bit of collage in them.

“An Underwater Dream,” 12×12 inches, acrylic with cold wax, by Dayna Collins.

“A Still Pond on a Humid Day,” 12×12 inches, acrylic with cold wax, by Dayna Collins.

But the challenge was mine, no one else knew I was attempting to pull off this arduous (to me) task. The fear grew, and I became paralyzed. Until I decided to push through. The opportunity came in the form of spending two weeks in Palm Springs in late January. We had rented a modern condo with a large dining room table (that was my main criteria in choosing our rental). I loaded up 12 12×12 inch flat birch panels, three working journals, two big bags of acrylic paint, a gigantic bag of collage materials, and a satchel of art supplies. I claimed the table (and the kitchen bar, and the kitchen prep counter, and sometimes the floor) as my work space. We were in Palm Springs to celebrate Howard’s birthday and his retirement, so he was there to golf. I was there to paint and collage. It was a beautiful win/win situation.

Daily, I worked in my journals.

I glued down collage onto the 12 boards.

Then I sidetracked myself to create a fresh batch of painted collage papers (that process is worthy of an entire blog post!).

And then I did what I had been hesitant to do. I started combining paint and collage in any way I could think to do it. If I did too much painting, I just added more collage. Sometimes I painted too much on purpose and glued collage on top. Sometimes I painted over the collage, revealing tiny bits of the collage beneath the surface. I sanded, I scraped, I reapplied paint, and added more collage.

I started to find my rhythm and I was having fun.

A body of work came together. I had started with the idea of creating six pieces for the show, and then it grew to nine. At the end of our two weeks in Palm Springs, I had twelve boards with potential. After we got home, I fine tuned a few of the panels and I had 12 that were show worthy – a beautiful grid.

Here are the 12 that are in the show.

“When Possibilities Seem Endless,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“This Big Life,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Secret Confessions,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Robust Vulnerability,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Nervous Curiosity,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Luminous Vulnerability,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“In the Presence of Mystery,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Dance of Distraction,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“Blurred Boundaries,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“A Lending Library of Wonders,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“A Deeper Sense of Belonging,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

“A Chorus of Memory,” 12×12 inches, acrylic and collage on flat birch board, mounted on a block, by Dayna Collins.

Traces opens tonight . . . . next up, my blog about the show.

New Year, New Journal

I have too many flippin’ journals all going at once, so what am I thinking starting another one. I am a sucker for journals. At the current time I am actively working in several. Follow me . . . .

Color Journal: A place to keep track of colors I like, the brands of colors because not all colors are the same, what happens when certain colors are mixed together, formulas of colors I like, and the Pantone color of the year (this year it is Very Peri).
A small painting journal where I have combined paintings with art quotes on the opposite page. This has been in process for the past couple of years.
A vintage book where I wipe off excess paint from my palette, clean off my brushes on the pages, glue in leftover tidbits, and experiment with quick ideas that pop into my head.
Visual Journal: This 9×12 inch journal is my hard-working jack of all trades journal. I take notes in it when I take a class, record ideas for a painting or a show, sketch out ideas, and take notes at art meetings. This is my official visual journal and has been a key part of my art practice for many years. The journals are lined up in my studio with little tags indicating the dates covered in each journal.
Collage Journal: An old composition book where a student kept notes and did engineering types of drawing, and also glued in tests and notes. I use this journal to create collage compositions right over the writing and drawings. The glued in papers I have torn out, but gluey residue peeks through on many of the pages.
Junk Journal: I created this big chunky book out of hundreds of pieces of old papers, collage materials, and ephemera, and created three signatures (or was it four? the journal is thick). The junk part was my use of junky papers, but then I have gone back in and embellished the pages, fleshing out more complete collage compositions. I have been working on this one for months!
Covid Journal: When Covid hit in full force in early 2020, I took one of the junk journals I had made and recorded milestones and statistics for the first full year of our lockdown. Every once in a while I will go back in make a note or update the statistics. Sadly, I am entering the third year of entries.
Travel Journal: Anytime we take a biggish trip, I maintain a travel journal. My most recent travel journal was done in September when we spent a couple of weeks in New York. I used a handmade artist journal and cut and glued paper and ephemera from our daily excursions.

Which brings me to January, 2022, and the decision to what I plan to do regarding a journal in the new year. In 2019 I committed to painting a painting a day in a 9×9 inch journal and somehow I pulled it off. Sometimes I was playing catch up, but for the most part keeping that painting journal got me into my studio. Every. Single.Day. (And it took seven journals to get through the year.)

A few of my favorite paintings from my 2019 journals:

In deciding what kind of journal would be most enjoyable, I flashed back to 2012 when I used “The Open Daybook,” a perpetual calendar book, edited by David P. Earle. I remember buying this big book of a journal at Monograph Bookwerks (fine art books, objects, + ephemera), located in NE Portland, and I was so excited to use it to record what I did every day for a year. Each page has original art by 365 artists (actually 371 as some worked in groups), so the imagery and graphics were always a treat.

A few of my pages from 2012. My entries were short and sweet, but really captured in detail how I spent my days.

That year of record keeping got me to thinking about what kind of journal I would keep now, ten years later. I keep a lot of visual journals (obviously, from the list above), and I have a calendar on my desk. But what if I kept my own sort of Daybook, a cross between what I did today, but coupled with a sprinkling of collage, dabs of paint, imagery, ideas, quotes, and what is on my mind (now there’s a scary thought). I liked the sound of this combination and I just happened to have the right journal for the job (cue the dramatic music), a chunky beast of a journal, built by Leather Village craftspeople.

I wrote a private preamble on New Year’s Eve, then jumped in on January 1st.

I am off and running.

Brooklyn Travel Journal

We spent the last two weeks of September in Brooklyn, New York, so of course I logged our trip with a Salvage Collage junk journal.

I didn’t make my own journal, but used one created by my friend Laurie at Black Dog Studio. It came with a nice variety of papers, including some heavy watercolor paper, so I was able to adhere all kinds of papers, post cards, street fliers, and whatever paper materials I could scrounge. It was a bit more challenging on this trip because during a pandemic, there isn’t as much print material as usual. But being the scrounger and junker that I am, I managed to cobble together a pretty interesting journal.

We rented a tiny Airbnb apartment in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. I set up my make do studio on a tiny desk in the corner of the tiny bedroom with a nice view of the fire escape and the Manhattan skyline in the distance.

I hunted and gathered each day, my piles of possible fodder growing and expanding, and I used the bed as a place to sort.

Every night after a day of exploring Brooklyn (or Manhattan), I returned to our apartment, where I cut and pasted the scraps I gathered during the day, into my journal. The journal began to take on a life of its own. I didn’t keep a chronological travelogue, or even write about our days. I just ripped, cut, and glued, creating a collaged journal with visual reminders of our first big trip in three years.

On our return trip, we turned a two hour layover in San Francisco into a three day layover (so I could see the Joan Mitchell exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). My travel journal just kept growing, setting up my studio on the desk in the corner of our hotel room.

Salem Art Group Daily Art Challenge

In July, my Salem Art Group hosted a 31-day art challenge, inviting the community to join our group in doing something creative every day for a month and posting on Instagram. I joined the challenge and managed to create something for all 31 days. I wasn’t always on time with my work or my posts, but I completed the challenge. Some days I did a little painting in my journal, other days I painted on 12×12 wood panels. And a few times, I did scut work, like prepping a bunch of panels. Most days I wandered into my studio and did something, but this challenge insured that I would go in and at the very least, create a collage or a small painting in my visual journal.

In no particular order and not all of my posts, here is a sampling of what I did during July to participate in the Daily Art Challenge.

Handmade Journal: The Great Pause (Part 1)

In mid March, all hell started to break loose as the Corona Virus began to consume our lives in one way or another. On Monday, March 23, Governor Brown mandated a statewide stay at home order. March 23 was the day I decided to create a journal where I could record not only what was taking place around the world and in Oregon, but also for me tucked safely inside my home. What was my new life going to look like in the upcoming weeks, or perhaps months.

The first thing I did was to make a journal using an old book and then gathering lots of paper fodder. I used book pages, music, scraps from torn apart books, and pieces of random papers, post cards, and handbills from my collage stash.

Once my papers were gathered, I bound the book using waxed linen thread and began embellishing the pages with scraps and raggedy book bits. Every day I would go through my journal and add interesting pieces to several pages, put wax paper between the pages, weigh it down overnight, and then come back the next day and do it all over again to different pages. I did this process of turning the pages and adding more day after day for three weeks.

Finally, on Monday, April 13, I declared that my journal was ready, the pages prepared.

At the same time, throughout the past three weeks, I have been writing notes to myself and making lists about the pandemic: sleeping in, routines, gift of time, rhythm of the day, tooth pain, sporty sneakers, oral surgery, helpless, daily walks, fake news, megalomaniac, self care, roller coaster . . . . .

I have printed things I have read: a poignant poem, a particularly good article on adjusting to how to live during this strange time, the timeline of how our president has fumbled and mismanaged the entire pandemic since the beginning. All things I feel inspired to record, share on my pages, or use as jumping off points for processing the range of emotions I have been feeling.

For now, I’m sharing a sampling of my pages before I make any entries, do any writing, make any lists, record poems and timelines, letting the beauty of the collages and materials speak for themselves.

Did I mention when I made the first journal that I made two more at the same time!?! What was I thinking?

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Final Pages

I did it! During 2019 I set a goal of painting in my visual journal every day. I sometimes fell behind if I was out of town, other times I took my paints and journal along with me and kept up. I fell waaaayyy behind in mid December and it took me until mid February to get completely caught up, but family medical emergencies are never convenient.

I filled 6-1/2 visual journals (I wrote about my process and the type of journals I used here) and created 366 pages of paintings (I accidentally painted two pages for the same day). Throughout the year I did blog posts sharing about my project and posting photos of my favorite pages; now I want to share some final photos of favorite pages created since my last post in early November.

It was a great year. Some of my takeaways:

I challenged myself to get into my studio every day.
I experimented with new ideas.
I pushed myself to use different colors and compositions.
I explored using a bigger vocabulary of marks and lines.
I challenged myself to be bold and at times audacious.
I had fun, which helped me paint loose.

Mission accomplished.

And now I’m doing something different for 2020. . . . . . .

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Selected Pages

I will soon complete journal #6 in my quest to do a daily painting in my visual journal throughout 2019. We’ve been revamping a house in Astoria on the Oregon coast, so I’m about ~~a week behind~~ two weeks behind in my daily paintings, and I plan to get caught up after Thanksgiving. Yesterday I cataloged the pages I have completed since early October, so I thought I would share some of my favorites.

Daily Art Practice: Visual Painting Journal – Recent Pages

Time for an update of my year long project of painting in a visual journal every day. Here’s a selection of pages from late summer through early fall. Favorites:

Themes continue to emerge: Play, experimentation, circles, layers, mark-making, revealing, excavation, color, lines . . . . and I’m in the final three months of my project.

Abstracted Play in Oil and Cold Wax: August 2019

What a wild week. Twelve women artists came together to take my Abstracted Play in Oil and Cold Wax workshop at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Some had taken my class previously, a few had learned from other instructors, and quite a few had never worked with oil paint or cold wax, and one was new to painting. There was some gnashing of teeth, lots of laughter, a little whining, a smidgeon of frustration, and in the end, happiness with their success and the beauty of their pieces.

I did demos every morning and afternoon . . .

The women then worked on their own pieces, working in multiples so they had lots of pieces to work on at various stages of the process.

One thing I loved seeing was the camaraderie of how the women supported each other and worked together.

I gave my Artist Talk on Saturday after lunch (they all showed up for my talk, although this photo makes it look like no one did!).

On our last day, we worked in the morning and then in the afternoon cleaned up our supplies, spread out our body of work, and did a walkabout, sharing the highlights of the week.

Here is an assortment of the work created during the week, in no particular order, some on boards, some on Arches Oil Paper, some large and some small:

It was a really fun week.

PS This was the second time I got to teach at Sitka this summer. In June, there was an opening and I was able to slip in a bonus version of this workshop, which I blogged about earlier.

Daily Painting Journal: How I Do It

Several people have asked me if I plan to offer a class on how I keep a daily painting journal. Whenever I’ve been asked, I’ve thought, I just paint something every day in a book. But there is more to it than that, so rather than a class, I thought I would share using my blog as the means to convey the details of what I do and the benefits of why I do it.

I’ll start with why I decided to keep a daily painting journal. The simple answer is I wanted to have a prompt or motivation to get me into my studio. I figured if I set an intention to do a small daily painting, I might just linger and do something else and build upon the time I spend in my studio. Many times that has happened, but other times, I do my painting and that is it for the day; but it is something.

Another reason I decided to start a practice of creating a small painting in a journal is that it allows me to experiment and play with ideas. By creating in a small journal, the painting isn’t precious, it isn’t for anyone but me, and it allows me a certain amount of freedom that painting on a large canvas or painting for a show doesn’t allow me.

What I learned along the way:

It’s fun. Sometimes I don’t want to stop and I allow myself to put leftover paint from my current page onto the next day’s page so I have something to respond to the next day.

It isn’t precious when it’s in a journal. It seems my inner critic is quieted by painting on the page of a journal. I approach it as just practice or at best playtime, so the censors are muted.

I was inspired along the way. I often use my daily journal pages as inspiration for bigger paintings, either in acrylic or in oil and cold wax. The pages allow me to play with colors and compositions so when it is time to show up in the studio and create bigger pieces with a deadline or for some other purpose, I have lots of ideas to choose from and use as a spring board, even if the finished piece looks nothing like my journal page.

My process:

It is important to have a dedicated space for doing my daily paintings. I have a table set up in my studio with acrylic paints, paintbrushes, palette knives, a brayer, water, paper towels, and mark-making implements such as pencils, acrylic paint pens, and oil pastels.

I use a 9×9 inch Super Deluxe Mixed Media journal by Bee Paper Aquabee (manufactured in Beaverton, Oregon). The journal has 60 sheets and the pages are 93 lb. weight; the journals retail for $21.25 (and at the time of this blog post, they are on sale at Dick Blick for $10.04).

I cover each journal with handmade paper, using sandpaper to rough up the cover’s surface, then adhering the paper with matte medium.

When I started this project at the beginning of the year, I painted an entry on each side of the page, but after a few days I wondered if I might want to do something with the individual paintings, i.e., pull them out and hang them for a show, or pull them out and mount them to a panel. If I had paintings on each side, I wouldn’t be able to do either of those things, so I quickly abandoned double-sided painting and now use one page for each daily painting. I go through journals more quickly, but I have options if I choose to do something with all or some of the paintings in the future.

I use acrylic paint on the pages. A few times I’ve incorporated collage, but so far the focus has primarily been on creating abstract paintings. For making marks, I use No. 2 and Stabilo pencils, Woody chunky crayons, acrylic pens, and oil pastels.

In my first four journals, my paintings are in the middle of the page, going out toward the edges, but not to the edges. When I started my fifth journal on August 11 (Day #223), I was ready to mix it up and started painting all the way to the edge on all four sides.

I let the paintings dry thoroughly, but for the first few days after I have painted a page, I insert a piece of wax paper to prevent the pages from sticking together.

I number and date each page, and then photograph each painting, which I store on my computer by the “day” number.

I regularly post photos of my daily paintings on Instagram and on my Facebook art page; I share selected photos on Pinterest, and on occasion, I do a blog post highlighting some of my favorite pages. Here are links to previous posts:

I recommend giving a daily painting journal a try, using my methods or coming up with something that works for you. The benefits are more than worth the effort and I love watching my journals stack up.