Stay Home, Make Mail Art — Royal Mail Art!

From a series of very Royal Mail Art.  It will be mailed while on my safe-social-distancing-walk today. All from old postage stamps featuring Queen Elizabeth (plus a few old stamps of her father, uncle and grandfather).   

Stay Home, Make Art, See the Sun Come Out – Day 33

Today is about some solar energy postage.

Stay Home, Make Art – Day 31

I have long been fascinated by cutaway images of the earth showing different layers above and below ground.  Today’s version in postage stamps is not the first time I was artistically inspired by those layers.

Stay Home, Make Art – Day 28

The piles of stamps on the table are starting to get smaller.  So far, this project has 16 completed pages.

Stay Home, Make Art – Day 3

Staying home and making art even the scraps for the recycling look fabulous.

No Plastic – Try Wax Paper!

I am trying to use less and less plastic, especially products in single-use plastic containers.  Sure, you can put it in the recycling bin, but there is such a glut of plastics, they end up in a landfill anyway.

I though the best way to respond to a “No Plastic” mail art call  was to create some mail art using wax paper.  Wax paper is old-fashioned, biodegradable/compostable and can often be used in place of plastic bags and wrap.  

Can you mail an old sock?

Yes, of course you can.  And, it would be best to wash it first (which I did).  This sock is on the way to France for a mail art call.   The theme is Past, Present & Tomorrow and the piece must include some textile element. Why an old sock?  Well, I always like to recycle and re-use. Old socks get worn out (past) and full of holes (present) and can end up in the rag bag (tomorrow) to be used for dusting your knick-knacks, or in this example, cleaning unused ink off my rubber stamps.

Scrappy Scrapbook

For about two years I have been working on the same scrapbook. I’ve reached the point where the book is full.  In other words, it is becoming difficult to close the book.

It all started at one of San Francisco’s library book sales where they sell donated and discarded books for $1.  I already owned a guide to London’s National Gallery from a visit I had made. I really had no practical use for a much older version, circa 1960.  Or did I?

My original thought was to cut the images out of the old book for collages.  Instead I started filling the book up.  It began with left over paint on my palette and scraps from other projects.  Collage bits, old postage stamps, maps, chocolate wrappers and other ephemera kept getting added.  The folks at the San Francisco Correspondence Coop contributed many of the artists stamps and some of the rubber stamps.  And finally, some of the random scraps I have received in the mail.  Some of the results are shown here.

Due Date

Recently I acquired  a pile of old due date cards that used to be in the back of library books.  The cards are obsolete.  Most of the books they were once found in have since been decommissioned.  There are date stamps on the some of the cards going back to the 1930s.  Fast forwarding to 2018, I ignored the author, the actual book itself and just took the title.  With the cards I have started adding little paintings that imagine a current book based on a past title.  These are a few of the new series.

Library Recycling

Start with a cover that is all that remains of old disintegrating book, next take some obsolete due date cards.  The results are a large postcard on the way to Spokane for a library-themed mail art call.

Florida Hijinks

What to do with a bunch of old instamatic photos from the 1970s. Instamatics were popular point-and-shoot cameras that used square format, 126 film in easy to install cartridges.  My own first camera was an instamatic.  The low quality of the camera and the cheap film has left us with faded snapshots 40 years later.  

Technically these are not “found photos” as I know the source. I ended up with a stack of some of my grandmother’s photos albums.  Albums filled with snapshots from Florida vacations with her friends and coworkers.  My grandmother had a successful careeras a department store buyer and these pictures were taken on well-deserved vacations.  Look closely, she is in some of the shots.  There is a lot of drinking, smoking, and partying going on as well as fishing and lying in the sun.

Because the photos are not family photos, they had no personal, sentimental value for me.  Get out the scissors, reach for the glue!  Here are some of the originals now repurposed in a new series of photo collages.

The Book is a Friend

Sometimes when you make and send mail art you have to accept that it just might not get there.  All that was left of this copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, was the cover.  That has been converted into a postcard with obsessively hand-painted bookshelves on the back – it was kind of addictive painting those.   Now, let’s hope it makes it to Russia.

Recycled Cowboys

Things a Cowboy Should Know, mixed media, collage, 8”x8’ on board

San Francisco is a city with a great commitment to recycling and composting.  And we are a city where we all have that neighbor who thinks cardboard goes in the trash and plastic goes in the compost.  We are a beautiful city with filthy streets.  Streets with all sorts of abandoned flotsam and jetsam.  And still, some neighbors purposefully leave boxes on the street for us all to rummage through.   You never know what you might find. I’ve found good books, antique cloisonné, materials for art projects and, in this example, the tattered remains of book titled Lore of the West: Roy Rogers with Gabby Hayes.  The 78 rpm record the book came with was missing (you can listen here).  Here is a website that will give you an idea what the book was like in its complete state. I chose to recycle the remnants into the collage shown here.  I only wish I could figure out who was responsible for the original, wonderful illustrations but for now they remain an uncredited artist that worked for RCA or the publisher.