Travel Journal – Dayna J Collins

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.

Tapestry of Resilience: A Visual Journal

We’re back from our six-week plus trip and my blank pages are now plump with found fodder, scrounged materials, a few photos, and lots of writing describing our adventures.

I posted on my personal (and public) Facebook page throughout our trip (Dayna Davidson Collins), so I’m not sharing about any of the trip. What I am sharing are some of the pages from my travel visual journal. In my last blog post, I shared that all of my pages (104 of them) had been pre-gessoed and painted, so all I took in the way of art supplies was a pair of scissors, a jar of matte gel medium, a paintbrush, a brayer, wax paper, and three gel pens – black, white, and red; all my supplies fit in a zip lock baggie.

The daily routine went something like this:

We set out for a day of exploring, hoping to easily find the Tourist Information office so I could gather brochures. Sometimes we weren’t near a TI, so the hunt was on for paper fodder. Art museums were good for brochures, and often their tickets were large and had beautiful art images on them, but there didn’t seem to be as much paper materials as there has been in the past. In a pinch, I bought a bookmark or a couple of post cards so I had images to incorporate onto my pages. Or I picked up bits and pieces of trash or pulled down chunks of posters.

At the end of the day and after dinner, I sat at my makeshift desk or on the bed and cut up images and words to use on my pages. I would make a list of everything we did and saw and began gluing things onto the pages; each day had a two-page spread. I glued, brayered, cleaned up the gluey edges, placed a piece of wax paper over the pages, and weighted them down with whatever was heavy and handy.

In the morning while sipping my cappuccino (which my sweet husband faithfully fetched), I removed the weights and wax paper, grabbed my gel pens, and referring to the list I made the previous day, wrote in and around the images I had glued, recounting what we had done and added details I thought were interesting.

Here are a few photos of me at various points of our trip, working on my pages.

Working at a table in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Sneak attack as I worked at my desk in our Berlin, Germany apartment.

The Pages. As I mentioned, my travel journal has 104 pages, so I’ll share a sampling of my two-page spreads, in no particular order.

When we got home, I had a few blank pages remaining, so I printed off some photos, inserted those on the last pages, then added my completed travel journal to a stack of pages from previous trips.

I’m Headed to the End of the World and Around the Horn

I’m headed out in about two hours for a trip that Howard and I have been planning for the past three years. We had hoped to take a big trip last fall, but we had too many other things going on so we had to veer away from our every-two-year travel plan. In the past, I’ve blogged about our month-long trips, spending many hours editing photos, writing text, and then publishing as we made our way through a country. My dear, patient husband would sit nearby as I connected to weak internet signals in little Internet cafes back before WiFi was as plentiful. One of our early trips was to Italy in 2008, where we rented a car and explored for a month. A link to those posts is here: Arrivederci! Then to France in 2010, where we rented a car and drove all over the country. Here’s a link to that trip: Viva La France. I blogged about our cruise in 2012 when we went to Italy, Greece, Croatia, and a bunch of other cool countries. Here’s a link to that one: A Grand Adventure.

We are off this time for another cruise, this time we’re heading south. However, I’ve decided not to blog during the trip (well, I might sneak in a post or two or three at the most, or I might not). I’ll be posting regular updates on Facebook (Dayna Davidson Collins) and occasionally on Instagram (daynalovesart). Unbelievably, several friends have said to post lots of photos, although I hope to show some restraint in what and how many photos I post.

So, where the heck are we going? We are flying to San Diego early tomorrow morning, then on Wednesday afternoon, we’ll board the Holland America cruise ship, Zaandam, and head south. We’ll be making three stops in Mexico, I’ll be spending my birthday in Antigua, Guatemala, then on to Ecuador, a couple of stops in Peru, five stops in Chile, a visit to the Falkland Islands, a stop in Uruguay, and finally ending up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We’ll truly be at the end of the world and just across from Antarctica as we round Cape Horn and go through Glacier Alley.

This ambitious itinerary means we have to pack for tropical equator weather and then prepare for cold, windy, penguin viewing weather. The cruise is 32 nights, then we’ve rented an apartment in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where our oldest daughter, Melissa, will be joining us for a week. Melissa speaks fluent Spanish and is a tango dancer, so it should be an adventuresome week and I have a feeling she will keep us out late and way past our bedtime.

Preparing to be gone for six weeks has taken a lot of energy, time, and planning. The house sitters have been arranged……

… my hair has been colored . . . .