Covid has kept me home and I have not travelled to Mexico for two years now. Ideally, I’d be there for the Día de los Muertos celebrations — it is one of my favorite holidays. Instead, I will make my ofrenda at home in San Francisco. And this past week I have been carving rubber stamps and making some mail art for the holiday. These postcards are on their way locally and around the world.
Using some brain power to carve some rubber stamps. This first round is a collaboration with the Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Žuromskas (he did the painted paper). These are heading around the world in the mail — more to come soon.
I usually do not paint the book titles in detail, yet many of the books in these paintings are still recognizable. Viewers spot a few books they have on their own shelves and many of us read the same books. In my latest painting you might notice a copy of The Thorn Birds — a ubiquitous title on the bookshelves of all moms of a certain generation. Yes, these are my mom’s books and things. And even though she has downsized (many of my parent’s books are on my shelves now), a true reader can’t help but fill a bookcase. Also, like many of the paintings in this series, small pieces of my art appear on the shelves (look for the slice of cabbage).
In a world gone mad, one of the ways I cope is nice long walks to Golden Gate Park. This time of the year the dahlias are in bloom. Beautiful and inspirational. This weekend was spent carving rubber stamps for a series of dahlia-themed postcards.
For many years I have collected and held on to a great amount of ephemera to use one day in various collages. This has included maps, postage stamps and hundreds of postcards. More recently I have been using up a lot of what I have saved for decades. Much of the material has ended up in artist books. My latest artist book, Collage Dreams, incudes 20 handmade, or as one now says, analog collages. Each collage is 10.5” wide x 11” high and made entirely from the contents of postcard booklets dating from 1910 to 1950.
When I started these collages with the goal of creating an artist book, I did it without an intentional agenda. This project was simply taking images out of their original context and arranging them to make pleasant and even amusing landscapes and cityscapes. Yet, as this series of collages neared completion, I began to suspect that I might be recreating some of the surreal, fragmented places that I keep seeing when I dream. I need to ask myself whether some of my dreams are about collaged places I will create instead of actual places I will one day visit.
A book is now available that includes all the collages. Some of the images are also available as prints.
