The e-mail query was direct, but the phrasing was careless: "I'm working on an article on making a living as an artist ... ," it began.

The response from writer Maureen Wallner came within half an hour: "Making a living," she wrote. "That's funny. If we count fulfillment, I'm a wealthy lady."

Less sarcastically, photographer Jack Wilhoit said: "I don't know any artist ... who is making a living selling their own art."

Camus once said that all artists try to reproduce in their work the most moving experiences of their past. By using these memories as a starting point, artists and writers give a delicious emotional energy to their work. These events can then be constructed, modified, and embellished to suit their ideas and images.

The latest show at the Quad City Arts gallery presents an assortment of such remembered associations, made with the perspective and vision of the present. Heidi Hernandez has painted personal, charming, and friendly stories from her family memories. Alison Minas photographed the interior scenes of a familiar haven in her large images of a '50s diner. And Steven Carlson has constructed numerous and startling toy-like "boxes of childhood visitations," full of personal reactions to the past.

Most of us remember our grade-school art classes, in which we cut up construction paper or magazine photographs and glued them together to make a collage. Few of us thought then that we were making art, for it seemed so much fun.

But this personal and beautiful medium is full of expressive possibilities that can reveal the artist's most intimate thoughts and feelings. On December 16, regionally known artist and calligrapher Shelly Voss opens a retrospective exhibit of her magical collage meditations. The reception runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at the Leger Gallery in downtown Davenport, and the exhibit will be up through January 19.

Jim Riesberg's most recent series of large-format collages originated from an auctioned four-pound box of vintage photographs, musty old invoices, advertisements, and water-stained inventory sheets from a hardware store that had been in business in the 1880s. By scanning and combining these written and visual sources, he has created a many-layered body of images, full of emotion.