Seeking visual examples for the pages of Your Idea Starts Here, I first started looking for collage artwork. I loved the idea of using a medium that uses different materials layered together to make something new. I started searching (very scientifically) for the right type of work by googling: “beautiful collage artwork,” and found Melinda Tidwell in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Melinda's work brings together order and abstraction from her mathematical past with fabulous color and juxtapositions, using vintage books as her material.
For the book, I commissioned Melinda to make collages based on the words gather, break, and build. Here is her composition for gather. And below, Melinda writes about her work:
“In the beginning, I was inspired by paperback book covers as a material — I was already doing collage with magazine pages, and the book covers just seemed much more interesting, especially the old, tattered ones. I would choose a group of colors that I thought looked good together, and start cutting shapes and rearranging them on a clean background. Later I began to use the type, words, images, and would do a lot of doctoring to my elements — but it is still these little interactions between the colored shapes that gives me the most juice. They begin to speak to one another and I love that process of trying to get ALL the elements to be contributing to a single, viable, conversation. There is continual surprise about what makes a piece work and it is completely challenging.”