Three defining discoveries that led to my odd obsession:
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 My love for the lost art of magazine advertising illustration (Honor and Respect for Creativity) |
 The conservation of resources (Doing Our Part to Help the World) |
As a young film student, dying to get into the movie business, I read Lenny Lipton’s book on Super 8mm Filmmaking. He shared his perception of how graininess in film is similar to the degradation of our own eyesight as we age. I realized that we’d all be in for a change in our ability to see as we got older. No one escapes this, it just comes with the territory. That feeling of surrender to our eyesight being less than perfect led to the understanding of just how awesome age really is. Metal rusts, wood gets weathered, dust mutes colors. I suddenly gained a deep respect for the look of age, and patinas of every sort.
When I found a pile of old 1930’s Popular Science magazines on a walk one day and thumbed thru them, I noticed there were a lot more illustrations used in advertising back then and a lot less photography. I instantly felt a sadness for the illustrations. I knew that old magazines get thrown away. The art would be lost forever. Some of the illustrations were quite clever and many of them were done with such high quality. I felt it was my duty to resurrect them and give them a new life so that the artistic efforts of these long-gone artists were not in vain. I wanted to find a way to honor their creativity. But mostly I wanted to give the illustrations their purpose back—to be seen and enjoyed.
I learned about conserving our natural resources and how we could do our part to help our ecology when I was in school (the second grade) and we got our free Smokey the Bear comic books. Those comics weren’t just about preventing forest fires, but about making sure we didn’t litter and about picking up other’s trash. Those comics suggested we might nourish a sense of responsibility for our environment. As I grew older, I learned about heinous and abject waste throughout America and a movement to prevent this began in the late 60’s and early 70’s. By the 1980’s people began to use words like “reuse”, “recycle”, and by the 2000’s “upcycle”, repurpose and sustainability.
All those concepts have made perfect sense to me.
I also began to understand the purpose of things. In a book I read, an author describes a man who frequents an antique store and asks repeatedly to try on a necklace. He wears it around the store for five minutes or so and gives it back. Eventually the store owner asks the man if he’d like to buy the necklace. But the man declines saying he’s just making sure the necklace doesn’t die from neglect. He knows the purpose of a necklace is to be worn.
Many Native Americans believe that there is an inherent spirit in all things (nothing more than the essence of it) and we can interact with that spirit. We can make it feel that it is not being neglected in the case of the necklace.
I also read about a man walking along the beach and picking up a piece of driftwood and carving it into a walrus. In the recounting of this story he says the artist perceived the piece of wood itself asking to be carved into a walrus. So the purpose of the object was determined by the object, not the artist. Fascinating!
I am on a journey to transform what I find, the discards of everyday life, into treasures of unmatched surprise and delight. It doesn’t always work, but I try with every piece to make something that people can desire. Desire is a wonderful feeling. To actually find something worthy of your desire in your lifetime is like hitting a target dead center.
The process of finding an object at its lowest station in life (discarded, unwanted, of no use…) and raising its position—refining its class and giving it renewed value is paramount in my mission. That is the crux of my creativity and why I do what I do. I encourage you to do the same. Because just like the study of alchemy, in the end it is ourselves whose positions we are raising, giving ourselves more value as human beings and bringing a little more class to our lives.
Found & Altered 