The Art Part

Eric is in Kalamazoo working a show this weekend, so time either weighs heavily or passes in a blissful blur -- the choice is mine. I can clean the house, list the new books from Thursday’s sale and do the laundry. Or I can sit on the basement floor, search through three enormous Tupperware bins filled with scraps of ephemera and make of my choices something new and surprising. The dust bunnies demanded attention, the laundry did too, but in the end I answered the plaintive whispers of the paper.

Of course, workaholic that I am, I had to justify giving myself over to art (do I dare call it that?), but this time it was easy because I actually needed to make something. In about six weeks it will be time for the Akron Antiquarian Book Fair and I have promised to bring a gift basket for the drawing at the end of the show. I decided to build the basket around Basbanes’ book Patience and Fortitude which I discussed here last week. My friend Nancy and I are co-conspirators in basket-building -- I’m the assembler and she the consummate shopper. I’ll form a fuzzy theme and she’ll grab hold of the scraggly ends of it and somehow together we’ll weave whole cloth. And that is exactly what happened yesterday when we hit the stores. There were a few things we couldn’t find so I can’t show you the whole basket yet, but I thought I’d give you a glimpse of the card I made.

I began with a vague notion of books and antiquity, but had no clear picture of what this could actually look like. As always, I chose way more items than I could use which meant a wrenching return to the bin for the enchanting tidbits that didn’t make the final cut – it turned out to be most of them. Once I choose a scrap I’m in love with it, so I have to force myself to remember the old adage about less being more. But in the end self-discipline won and the card is made from only one half sheet of cardstock, fibrous art paper, paint, a piece of corrugated, a torn piece of old Chinese money, small portions of the cover of a Banana Republic catalog, and – I love this! – a fragment of an ad for e-readers! The book gods were so tickled over that last bit they fell over laughing, so I’m counting on being handsomely rewarded for their amusement in the not-so-distant future.

In the end, the card pleases me too, though niggling thoughts of what else might have been created snip around the edges of my satisfaction. It’s always like that for me. When I’m making it I love it, but when it’s done the contentment falls away a chip at a time until eventually there’s nothing left but a sad disappointment. I hope I don’t feel that way when it’s time to take the basket to the show, but it’s likely, so I will try not to look at the card too much until then. The ultimate disappointment though is that I don’t allow myself much time with the paper and paints, even though I love them. For me creating “art” is not really about product anyway because at heart I’m a process junkie. What I groove on is dwelling in that pure suspension of time where anything is possible and the work is both surprise and enlightenment. For one brief afternoon heaven meets earth and nothing else matters.

P.S. In answer to a reader's question, the book on the left is raised and was made entirely by me from a small piece of cardboard which is on top of the larger raised portion which gives the card three "levels". The spine binding on the big book wraps around to the side of the card and even has a title box. The brown book labled "Poe" was also made by me with corrugated providing the spine bands which I gilded. The other books came directly from the e-reader ad.