Letting It Rip

It was only this past May that I let myself rip. Literally.
I owe this movement forward to a series of conversations with a painter who also works in the Rare Book Room of The Strand in New York City.

This is a picture of The Strand, taken in May. The Strand has 18 miles of books and is located at the corner of 12^th and Broadway in New York City.

Here is my favorite shelf in The Strand. In the Rare Book Room, there is a section just for well-worn books, called Breakers because...well...the books are broken.

And here is my purchase from that day, an 1837 copy of Journal des Demoiselles.

You can see that the book comes with pull-out patterns. There are many of them interspersed throughout the book.

With a book as special to me as this one, prior to May of this year I would have waited for a rainy day, donned my barge-mule hat, and tediously scanned the texts and images that I could see myself using in future works of collage. Out of respect for old books, for the sake of preservation but also as a charm against messups--to put it bluntly, scanner as garlic-bulb necklace.

Enter my painter friend and the aforementioned conversations.

And now I rip.

Here are some altered playing cards in the prep stage, using text snips from Journal des Demoiselles, coated with a wash or two of raw sienna glaze.

I might rip small, but it's a big deal for me. Even though most of the text will probably be covered up as the collages are completed, I will know that the original bits and pieces are under there, and that history goes forward.

Here's a finished altered playing card using Journal des Demoiselles text. The check used at the bottom of the card is also from the original--it would seem that nothing of the paper persuasion is safe from me now.

"Dog Lover," using image transfer from a photo courtesy of the collection of Mrs. Inman