Original Art: A love affair with collage and Paris
I've been sorting through piles of papers. Not as much joy as one expects after watching Marie Kondo's Netflix series. Paper piles can be such jerks. They require time and energy to sort through, and if you don't sort and discard correctly, you run the risk of identity theft or losing that all important tax form. This week I was in search of said tax form.I found many tax papers one must retain for years, but didn't find the ONE tax form I was looking for, obvs. I also found a few old books that had aged so very gracefully. I love the look of yellowing paper. The binding was coming apart on many and the papers were attached with dust and a prayer, but I loved them all the same and greeted them like they were old friends.
The colour of Paris is the same colour as faded books.
Then I took a few sketches, slipped some old book paper behind them and voila!
The faded papers become a soft pastel paint for my sketches. And with Paris being such a literary city, it seems fitting that words hover in the air on the art.So many great lines from those old books. So very quotable. Here is one of the quotes in the Montmartre collage above.
"Memory is a notoriously biased and sentimental editor, selecting what it wants to keep and invariably making a few cosmetic changes to past events. With rose-coloured hindsight, the good times become magical; the bad times fade and eventually disappear, leaving only a seductive blur of sunlit days and the laughter of friends. Was it really like that? Would it be like that again?" Peter Mayle, Encore Provence
And another great line from John Glassco's Memoirs of Montparnasse on this Shakespeare & Co collage.
"During our first week in Paris we never left Montparnasse at all, simply moving from one café and restaurant to another. It was then early March and the enclosed stove-heated terrasses were the best places to sit and pretend to work, for work was for us more a pretense than anything else... But it was more fun to play at being a writer. Later I found that a great many other young writers felt and behaved the same way. Indeed Paris is a very difficult place fore anyone to work unless he is dull and serious."
That John Glassco wrote a slew of good one liners. I added one such line to this boulangerie sketch:
"His regular mistress was a large, fat, wise-looking middle-aged Frenchwoman who worked as a pastry cook on the Right Bank. She had no interest in art and did not seem particularly fond of him, but, as he said, she was easily available and had always a wonderful smell of freshly-baked pie-crust."
Who wouldn't want to snuggle up to someone who smelled of pie. Notice the Guest Check I added. For some reason, in sifting through my papers, I came across this gem of a restaurant receipt from a day I don't remember at all. I hope the French toast was good. I think our chef looks rather French, though I suspect the paper came from a diner in California.
They say good art deserves a frame and bad art needs one. I don't know if this is true, but I know that framing something tends to complete it somehow so I framed up the collages.
Part of me wants to just make an entire book of these collages; match my sketches with wonderful literary words and gorgeous faded paper. (After completing 150 Paris Letters, I have a lot of sketches and Paris-based books.) Not all frames are created equal. Frame hunting could be a sport.I watched an interview with James Cameron once when he was asked what happened to the nude drawing of Kate Winslet. He walked over to the file cabinet and pulled it out of a folder. I was horrified. This wonderful art was in a FILE CABINET? It was later auctioned off for $16,000 in 2011, but Titanic came out in 1997. That's a long time in a file cabinet.
Then I looked at my own files and realized all my art is in file cabinets and binders and PAPER PILES. And as we know, paper piles can be such jerks. So as I sort, I now create, and frame. Now THAT is some Marie Kondo-type joy. Happy dance!
