the scrapbook as art

I'm not much of a scrapbooker. I don't buy anything that I can't get on sale. Half my stickers and background designs are magazine pages I liked, and so far my scrapbooks are mostly just collage-y substitutes for trip photo albums because the photo album pages they make these days are cheap crap, no matter how fancy and expensive the cover they put on them. (Don't dare try to look at the notes on the back of a picture because the barely-attached slip-cover will pull up or off or tear, they're so pitifully cheap. So we had a quilters and scrap-bookers joint retreat and I saw what a scrapbook could be like, and went with it. I never use my den so it's now the place where I gather scrapbooking supplies, enough for years to come, probably (though even with cut-out, collaged photos from my trips and just a few backgrounds and stickers I can fill forty pages with one longer trip or a couple of shorter ones).

My plans are always big, though. I managed to get a few really great vacations into scrapbooks or what I had left of the older, nicer albums, but I have some eight or ten boxes (not photo boxes, I mean those heavy, lidded boxes that originally held twenty packages of office copy paper) of photos (and other trip things, like brochures and tickets and maps) from the past decade or two. Some I chose not to put in albums, some I saved for special themed scrapbooks I haven't got to, yet, like a family portrait book or my planned cookbook (yes, I've taken pictures of food and place settings as well as path ground covers, tree bark, and garden herbs) and especially one I think of as from my middle school science class term that I've never heard since - Biomes. The biomes are for my novels, especially the fantasies that take the characters through mountain passes and swamps, mystic ancient forests and endless plains. I've been collecting pictures of story settings forever but never quite managed to put them all together into an album or scrapbook but it will be impressive when I do. (I dream big, even if the reality never quite gets there).

Though I haven't made many books, and would probably be considered by most of the scrap bookers I know to be "missing" the goal of lovely pages that might only have one or two pictures beautifully arranged with my chaotic (but carefully laid out, with story, color choices, and consideration of density and ballence) pages of flowers and waterfalls and wildlife, waves and landscapes and the most vague timelines, being more about place and focus than the sequence in which they were seen; still, I see the fascination of it, and the potential. I quickly learned the delight in sticker shopping and the point of the stickers (which I was slow to incorporate as a substitute for invisible double sided tape, and still rarely use without also helping hold on a picture). I see the art element of it in my efforts to get a page that can b pleasant to look at as a whole while also showing off my photographed memories. And gradually I understand one of the early books I saw that seemed to have no purpose at all: just decorate pages laminated thick with cut outs or vague collages of decorated paper all on the same color theme and no photos, no picture element at all. It was scrapbook a pure art. Something pretty to look at.

My imaginings don't quite go that far, but they might be close, especially in the eyes of someone else, not knowing the meaning I put behind the pages I imagine, the more abstract collages I envision gathering in a scrapbook-as-collage-art. They remain on my to-do list rather than my acted-on list, but the vision is slowly growing and I've made notes about potential pages. I did a collage for a leadership workshop, magazine cutouts (mostly catalog ads, actually, with clothes I would never by, colors I liked regardless of the object, and other things intended to represent my interests and priorities) and I can see doing that for page after page with a better selection of magazine and catalog cutouts, added painting and calligraphy, photos and confetti and other flotsom and jetsom, each conveying a message about me or my interests or my views of the world, even if only I can interpret the message behind it. Is that not the essence of art?