leftovers

These are the final pieces of this stuff, the remnants of the stacks and stacks of paper and junk that I thought could be in the end the only stuff left -almost -that I could use.

And I will contemplate the rest and begin -well maybe -to keep and collect against.  I threw a few out too. Not many.  But enough for now.

And these. This! Is hardly about anything except well these are what was finally sitting there and I could sort of arrange it.

I suppose this must happen to a lot of artists.  I remember in that book about Miro he was sitting there and was asked, well what is next?  And he responded I don't know.  Will there be anything or not?

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or that box of matches contains a secret life which is much more intense than that of certain human beings. -Joan Miro

why wait

The funny thing is that  these collage paintings always take a long time to make.  In fact none of these would have ever gotten made except that I decided to clean it all up off the dining room table where it sits in giant piles.

Well just as luck would have it, I discovered another dining room table that had nothing on it at all.  What luck.  And it was only in the adjacent room.  So I moved most of the paper to it and sorted it on the way.  

But other people who live here and like to make things and even eat at tables were having none of this.  I had gone just too far.  Gosh darn it.  I had to rush around prepare paper and lay out what I thought might work...and fast too.  I got it all done in one day or two and I stacked the paper on the sideboard.  Ouch.  As I looked at it I realized there was still a big mess.  Only it was now on three tables instead of one.

I immediately got out my glue sticks and bamboo tools and glued like a maniac kid in kindergarten.  I was also painting downstairs on the ping pong table and on the kitchen counter.  It was all hopeless.  I was afraid things might start disappearing.  What do the want of me?  There is still a little round table with nothing on it.  Ahhh! Perfect!  

I used it to keep gluing and painting and stuff while other stuff either dried or sat contemplating itself.  

And we still have chairs!  Well they are perfect to stand things on while I look at them.

And with these Herculean efforts...this mad determination.  And a bit of patience from the onlookers.

I eventually got the tables almost completely cleaned off.  And the sideboard too, except for a tiny stack.  And the kitchen counter, at least for this morning.  And the stack of stuff left on the other table I am still working on.  Its a neat stack. Honest.  And the ping pong table doesn't count cause it is downstairs.  And those are big paintings down there.

This is what the artist is forced to go through when he wants to create!  

Ahemm.  I just realized that I have paints permanently stationed on every counter in the kitchen.  And in the dining room.  This is a proliferation.  There is one spot stuffed with brushes, and another with rollers and mostly empty bottles of paint (so I can save the bottles and their stoppers).  And there is still more paper out there I found yesterday and organized again....

the age of paper

You think it will be here forever.  But it is almost over now.  I am getting weird plasticy stuff in the mail now all the time.  And in the grocery stores its become common.  No it is almost gone and will be before we can say good by.

I already use old stuff when I can find it like the origami paper thank god it remains and these beautiful playing cards are from the late forties when we were there in Japan and you find them at estate sales now.  If you can find them still.

Much of the energizer stuff comes from the hardware store where there are still some old fashioned companies that have not quite bothered to change.  In fact some of it comes out of my work cabinets and is already thirty years old.

All the paper I use comes from the Arches/Rives plant in France.  Thank the French for maintaining them.  And of course the natural foods for kids are usually but not always in nice cardboard.  

Well yo-yos you just never know.  Magazines yuck you've felt them.  Just be happy its thin paper.

I can't wait to see these things evolve and the reverse images to show.  On the origami it will be cool.

Though I must admit I have little hope for anything at all to last even twenty years.  It just doesn't happen.  These bicycle cards were an old deck of mine.  Fine cardboard.

Ahh Botan Rice Candy.  It must be soon saying its last prayers.  I remember it from the early seventies.  The same package.  Credit cards.  What junk.  But we make guitar picks from them now.

That's fun.  They are gleamy and shiny and have multiple images in them so when you do make picks from them they are harder to lose.

And these Chinese food containers.  They used to be white all of them then they got colored then plastic then kind of ugly and they no longer have much use to us now.

Don't get me wrong.  I am not reminiscing about the olde days but stating the fact that all ages must past.  All materials change and not always for the better.  I love paper.  And soon it too will pass.

The time of its abundance will be gone.  Sure...there will be something else.  Yep something else.  I think one of the lovely things that happened in that age of Max Ernst was the common objects then and I think part of the reason we go to art museums is to see them once more.

I can remember as a kid I could not dig in the ground without finding old arrow heads and then in Virginia I would find bullets and pieces of civil war metal and leather.  I don't yearn for them now.  I am just saying they are now gone.

Yep goodbye old paper age.

it's still a fight

I think I've got it.  I'm working on the last little bit...suddenly I realize lightroom is still fighting with me.  I don't quite understand.  I always speak of it with respect -and I think of it the same way.

So what is causing this mood?  Why isn't it happy?

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -Anias Nin

We don't see things as they are we see them as we are. -Anias Nin

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.  -Mark Twain

I like this one.  It gives me a feeling that it likes me.

And this one seems to stand forever in silent abeyance.  It waits. and the waiting fits.

Dreams pass into the reality of action.  From the action stems the dream again: and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. -Anias Nin

Collage for a minute

I gotta say I like this one only because I imagine the last MBA candidate  in the States desultorily working on a project to see what exactly is written on this old paper and trying desperately to get someone to like this stuff.  And what is on the back of that black piece?   

You need to understand that I like this guy (or gal).  I see him as me.  Hopelessly unadept, educated in the only field officially trashed by a president.  -and I don't think the president was wrong.  It is me and those that follow the same track as I do.  We are in a field that is not going not moving not on track not anything.  

But I like the pictures. and that's it I guess.  And in this far blue bubble future, my friend as I call him is simply studying an artist he discovered in some dust bin behind an apartment building.  He has only scraps but that is enough for him to imagine the entire scope of the artist's work.

But no one cares. Period.  So he goes into his own imagination, and that is how we meet.  In some stupid artists recovery program in the world of imagination which by that time will be practically illegal.  Even though it doesn't really exist.  It is the extinction of the imagination.  It is a future. 

Things like this which interest maybe three or four people now will be of no interest to anyone in this future.  I can see it coming.  Can't you?

Do you ever wonder which of these I worked on, thought about, constructed, looked at a choose carefully balanced pieces of paper that have good images on the reverse side so as they age and those sides become the image, they will be more interesting?

I'm not sure of any of them.  Sort of like I don't believe yet in their loyalty.  Are they images that speak to me? Yes. Many of them.  But what language do they use? And what is this conversation?  What is a truth we hope to sneak up on?  A truth to catch napping so to speak.