I love color, so it’s kind of weird for me to work in neutrals, but it really does make you work a little harder atcomposition. These two pieces go way back to my first collage class, probably more than 10 years ago. I had been quilting for quite a while, doing all of my stitching by hand because I spent days at the computer and didn’t want to spend nights and weekends on another machine. I was thinking maybe collage would let me complete more pieces more quickly. In one of the greatest happy accidents of my life, I signed up for a collage class with Chery Baird at the Spruill art center in Dunnwoody Georgia near where I was living in Atlanta at the time.  Unlike so many of those short adult education classes, Chery was and still is determined to give us the opportunity to get a high-level arts education if we were willing to stick with her one eight week session at a time. It was the beginning of a multi year journey through collage, composition, and color theory classes along with any number of workshops. She had a very specific curriculum laid out, and this exercise in using neutrals was near the very beginning. My heart will be forever grateful, and my closets will be forever overwhelmed because now I see the world the way she sees it, meaning there’s almost nothing you come across that you can’t imagine using in a collage in some way.