Loose Leaf Notes

20 custom-made leather bound journals, some bulging to a height of half a foot, tell a visual story of a personal evolution.  “I don’t think of my life as more interesting than someone else’s but I took the time to record it in an interesting way.  The themes are universal,” said 30 year-old Josh Copus, a North Carolina potter and the collage journal artist who created the journals.

It all began when Copus was packing to leave his childhood home in Floyd, Virginia, for Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2000.   Finding an old journal in his toy box, written when he was 15 years old, his first impulse was to toss the embarrassing record of childhood ramblings, but “I also knew it was an important part of my history that I couldn’t just throw away,” he remembered.

At that time Copus was regularly carrying around a sketchbook, a journal, and a photo album. The bulky nature of managing so many books gave him the idea to combine his artistic pursuits and record keeping into one book.  With ripped out pages from that childhood journal, he began laying the foundational canvas for what would become an ongoing autobiographical art memoir, one that is currently marking its 10^th year.

The first collage journal was so full it wouldn’t close, so Copus enlisted the help of Asheville bookmaker Annie Fain Liden for future books.   Spaces between signatures, individually bound, made the books Liden created for Copus expandable, giving him the freedom to expand his expression through the use of art mediums.  Today, only hints of Copus’s teenage record remain under layers of new handwriting, paperclips, paint, cardboard, transparencies, recycled scraps of life, and photos of photos that have been altered with scissors and pens.

“The more I can layer the pages, even if you can’t see a lot of it, the more successful they are. The layering is the structure that supports the end piece,” Copus said, adding that “the value is in what lies underneath. It’s the same way I feel about human beings.  It’s what’s inside us that makes us who we are.  If you just look at someone you don’t see everything.”

One page in his most recent journal documents a morning walk from the ClaySpace cooperative gallery and studio he founded in the River Arts district of Asheville to the Klingman Avenue Café for coffee.  Incorporating found objects– a ticket, a piece of styrofoam, and square of pink cardboard– the page compliments an adjacent one that features an image of a ceramic bowl in shadow, pasted on a background image of finger-painted mud.  Another, layered with a restaurant menu peeking through the window of an envelope, is topped off with an audio tape.

Although the journals span a 10 year period and chronicle Copus’s growth from age 20 to 30, the pages encompass more than that.  Childhood themes, family heritage, love affairs, and art influences are all explored with poignancy and with a flair that reflects Copus’s bent towards theater and performance art.

20 journals in 10 years is an average of 2 a year, but Copus said he made 5 journals when he was studying for his fine arts degree at University of North Carolina Asheville and less when he was building woodfiring kilns on his property in the countryside of Madison County.  The process is slow and personal.   “If I take shortcuts the work doesn’t have the same quality,” Copus said, explaining that he frequently goes back and adds to pages, which are not in linear sequence.

Unlike most art, Copus’s journals weren’t created for an audience, so there’s a raw honestly that comes through them. Like dream symbols, his collages have the capacity to bypass the brain’s processing time to convey an emotional message.  Recently he’s begun to explore options for publishing a compilation book of journal pages.  “I like stories and I started to see the books as an interesting story,” he said.

Like any good work of art, Copus’s collage journals have the power to elicit a longer look, a deep breath, a sigh, a smile.  And, like a well written narrative, the visual narrative that each one tells is a real page turner.

Post notes: More of my Asheville potter son’s  collages are posted HERE. See a write-up on Josh’s collage journals at bookmaker A. Fain’s website HERE.