When I first moved into what we called L...house, in 1954, a field sloped down from the front and back yards. At the bottom of the field was a stream and beyond the stream a large hill that filled the horizon to the sky. This was the scene I woke up to in my bedroom window, every morning.
My seven-year-old worldview, my belief, was that the landscape was an immutable reality. The field, the hill, the stream--they were all part of the earth, always were and always would be
One day I looked out the window, and saw trucks on my hill. Within a very short time, my hill was gone. How many days did it take? I don't know. I guess it wasn't a large hill, because soon the trucks had flattened the horizon and my hill was gone.
My collage represents the way that intrusion felt to me.
I guess flattening my hill was progress. There are usually winners and losers with progress. For example, the automobile was a miracle of transportation, but with its arrival a lot of horse breeders were put out of work.
What I learned, when my hill was flattened, was that someone actually owned it. I know the man was a farmer. Maybe he bought new farm equipment with the profit. Trucks carried away the soil. I don't know if it was sand or gravel, but someone bought that soil and made money off of that, also. Eventually, a mobile home park was built where my hill used to be (after I moved away, thank heavens). Many people were given affordable housing. All pluses.
What was lost when my hill was flattened? My view. The wonderful afternoons I spent sitting in the grass on the side of that hill. The many insects and animals that found food on that hill, and lived there. Finally, a carbon sink was lost. According to UC Davis, grass is even better at carbon sequestration than forest land.
The Plan for My Collage
Obviously, this is a highly personal picture. As an expression of that I was careful about the elements I used. All the elements associated with the hill/field before the excavation were taken from a file of digital images I created a few years ago. The children, the dogs, the plank, the house and barn behind the trucks were all drawn digitally from my emotional memory. The other elements--the dump trucks, bulldozer, processing plant, barrel and dead grass around the excavation--these were provided by external sources, Pixabay or LIL. I used a GIMP airbrush to paint in the stream water.
The boy with his arms raised represents one of my brothers. He's jumping in the picture. The two seated figures represent one of my sisters and me. The dog sitting between us looks a lot like a dog we had. Here is his picture, the real-life dog, lying in the field, with our cat.
The two other dogs are mostly generic, although we had a black dog named Hortense, and a spotted terrier named Skippy. We really did throw a plank across the brook, at its widest part, when the spring rains came.
The miracle of art, even bad art, is the way it helps us feel experience. By creating this picture I brought it all back. It was seventy years ago, but with this scene I put myself there again, and experienced the feelings of my youth.
Element and Process
I thank the people from whom I borrowed parts of this collage.
I thank most of all @quantumg, whose photo served as the template for this LMAC contest
You can see the stream bed is dry in @quantumg's photo. Never did I see our stream bed dry up like that. The flow would shrink and swell by season, but always there was water. That flowing water was something I could hear from my bedroom window.
I started the collage by adding characters who were sitting next to the stream bed. The first young lady represents my older sister.
That's me sitting next to our dog, and Hortense on the plank.
There's my brother, the white dog, the house (in the distance) and the barn (in the distance). The wood stump was just a temporary addition to the picture.
When I added the mining elements the barn had to move, and the piece began to look fussy to me (notice the hatchet in the wood stump).
I decided to narrow the focus, chop off a piece on the side of the collage, and concentrate on the action in the center of the picture. Got rid of the stump--it didn't serve any purpose. Added trucks to suggest activity. Finally, I painted in the stream so that the plank would make more sense. Why, after all, would a dog cross a dry stream bank on a plank? :))
You can see that throughout the process I played around with the color. I used a Vintage filter from Lunapic and also played around with tone on GIMP.
I know the final picture may not be aesthetically pleasing, but it is exactly what I was going for when I started this collage.
LMAC is a welcoming community. We offer prizes, and curation for every collage submitted (you must follow the rules spelled out in our announcement blog). Become a part of this community, especially if you are not an artist. You may be surprised at finding the artist in you.
There is plenty of time to enter the current contest, which doesn't end until the evening of 9/29/2025 (I don't compete because I am on the jury).
Also, please note that our image library welcomes contributions from everyone on Hive, and anyone on Hive may borrow from the library. Procedures for borrowing and contribution are described in @shaka's blog, here.
Thank you for reading my blog. Peace and health to everyone. Hive on!
Ah, the old plank-across-the-stream trick. We tried that ourselves last year to cross the raging torrent that, from October to March, cuts our walking route in two. Brilliant it was, for exactly one day. Then some bugger nicked the plank. You never see a living soul around here, yet planks vanish and old mattresses materialise as if by magic. I'm beginning to think there’s a secret society of chancers lurking behind every bush, just waiting for their moment.
😂
Fortunately, we never saw evidence of anyone near our property. I say our property...apparently we (my grandfather) didn't own the hill. Did he own the field? I don't know. My grandfather bought that place in 1953, I think. Legend has it he payed 10,000 cash for the house, which was at least a 100 years old. It was supposed to have come with 13 acres. That's the story, anyway, but he never talked to me about it, so how would I know?
In those days men would always have their rifles at a ready. I don't think vagrants or miscreants would have lasted long. It was the U. S., you know :)))
u mean there's an artist in me too?? :P
😅
There surely is an artist in you...and I think it is struggling to be free!
We had a really nice wooded area behind our house. I had always wanted to buy it for myself, but the price was always too high. Eventually someone else bought it and put a big house back there. It's not so bad in the summer because the leaves cover the view, but in the winter you can see the house through the woods and it annoys the crap out of me.
When I look at Google maps at the old house (it's still standing!) it seems to be encircled by development. We had one of those areas on the other side of the house, like a small wood, miniature trees, wild raspberry bushes. Looks like it's all gone. So sorry about your little forest. That would have been a nice, natural buffer.
Yeah, it was for the first couple of years we lived there. That's why I always wanted to buy the land so I could just keep it undeveloped. If crypto would have been kinder to me, I probably could have.
That reminds me sort of when there are trees and green all around and they arrive and cement everything and cut the trees... Sad... Good collage there, gives the right feelings
It's a cliche to say we didn't have much, but we really didn't. We had family and we had the outdoors. It was a good way to start life. We had the stuff that matters. I think that connection to nature is a part of me and I'm grateful for it.
Here we say "it was better when it was worse", back then we had less and it's said it was worse than now, but it seems it was better back then
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