When I began to examine the rose bushes closely, the bad memories began to come. My university, now destroyed and on fire, had a square with very similar rose bushes. Perhaps that is why the idea of reading found a place in this collage. Reading has always been a defense against evil that is too close. At that university, and many times contemplating those roses, I learned to read again. I assumed literature as part of my life.
Shaka's photograph for Round 61 of Let'sMake a Collage (see the bases here) is very beautiful, but above all it's an invitation. I decided to respond to that invitation with a poem that is very important to me: "El otro tigre", by Jorge Luis Borges.
I would also like to share these lines with the warm @agmoore, and not only because I know that at least once she researched about the Argentine author, but because, after having seen his collage, which is a tribute to imagination and literature through the references to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I feel that there is a singular affinity of interests, which I appreciate.
The poem "The Other Tiger" is a poem about the possibility (or impossibility?) of representing reality. If I could point to a beginning for my career as a researcher, perhaps it would be this one. It is also a fundamental question for any artist.
In my collage there are not only the words of Borges' poem, but there is Borges floating above his words, perched on an ink star.
Source
Below I put two little reader girls, because a reader is really always an alter ego, and the tiger of dreams that fiction represents, but if you look at the background, the door to the horizon is guarded by a ram, the animal that protects the Egyptians and creates the winds. I am not especially mystical, but today I want to believe that protective spirits exist.
I put a huge rose in the center, but it is not a rose: it is the image of a rose's photograph (never forget Magritte's lessons).
I wish you could read Borges' poem (here you can find it in Spanish and English, in Alastair Reid's translation).
About the process
Once the theme was decided, the first approach was to go around that structure. I cut it out and from there came the rönir that is about to land on this side of things.I enlarged the format of the photo, because I needed more space in the background. Then I replaced the sky with sheets of old paper, written with a typography that evokes old typewriters. The trees were stuffed in drops of water, to make them strange. After all, if you get close enough, everything can be very strange. I tried to maintain a certain order of the elements with tensions that form triangles and the distribution that respects the planes of @shaka's photography, but I broke the scale, so that the human and animal figures would help me to maintain the unreality, as if the rose park was a toy park.
I worked with Gimp.
Apart from this, I continue to marvel at the masks I learned in @quamtung's kind lessons.
Below is a list of the images I used:
Photo by @shaka
Readers
https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vfynt
https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/ni%C3%B1a-vintage-victoriana-de-fondo-1001973/
Rose
https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vqyul/es
Tiger
https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/tigre-acostada-arte-vintage-2240883/
Paper Bird
https://pxhere.com/es/photo/908320
Borges
https://snl.no/Jorge_Luis_Borges
Paper background
https://pixabay.com/es/photos/de-papel-la-textura-de-edad-5746244/
A man once told a story.
My grandmother picked up that story and kept it.
One day he gave it to me, but it was so old, it was moth-eaten.
I remember the holes of old age and ruin.
And yet, it was a story as beautiful as gold.
I have kept it for many years.
Who will I give my story to?
I give it to you.
Keep it and one day let it fly.