As you can see the weird stuff is no longer getting printed on the envelope, though I can’t easily stop the smudging at each edge. It was the nozzles needed cleaning.
Well today was a scorcher. Yes the weather was hot too but I felt sad about putting today’s piece in the envelope.
If you read the back of the envelope you will see I felt there was a sense of the I Ching in the way I wrote, and then wrote a parody. When I came to title this post I felt the same thing and had to hold myself back from making it sound more Confucian!
I think I have said all I want to say on the envelope except to emphasise that I think the printer patterns have gone too far. I checked the drivers and printed – they are ok – and printed out a photgraph with interesting results, so it must be the nozzles. Watch out for tomorrow’s exciting installment!
I could pretend that I was surprised and deeply upset that the special #Letter365 box in the Bridport Arts Centre foyer had disappeared when I went to deliver No103 by hand. The truth is that Polly had been kind enough to let me know in advance that another installation was using that space for a few weeks and a very interesting array it is too!
So I had to post this piece into the hands of lovely Dee, who finally appears in a picture with enough of her face showing to be recognisable. You will note the worsening state of the printer errors front of the envelope. My annotation about it on the back appears below:
The great thing about exploring the interplay between chaos and control is that when it all fucks up it is just the effects of chaos in the ascendant. In other spheres at other times marks on envelopes or any other unforeseen mistakes or problems would have caused me a lot of unhappiness and anger,
The marks on today’s envelope are quite attractive and it would be gret to be able to reproduce the effect at will and they did mar what should have been just neutral grey and red. You might notice that the red is hardly red. I have been blaming the paper, but I fear the printer is on the blink. I might have a little investigate one day soon.
Yesterday I pondered about how 100 and other round numbers have an unwarranted fascination for us but it could be said that 101 has more call to be celebrated. Room 101 was the torture chamber in Orwell’s 1984 and it has subsequently been turned into a kind of joke with the BBC shows of the same name. In the US 101 is used to denote the introductory or beginners’ level of anything – I hope I am past that now with #Letter365! 101 is the phone number to contact the Police with non-urgent matters and there is of course 101 Dalmatians, the Disney movie based on Dodie Smith’s book. I probably should say “movies” but the 1961 classic is so far ahead of the others it is in a different league – and there you have caught me out because to be honest I have not seen 102 Dalmatians but, however good Glenn Close might have been in it, it is rare that a sequel offers more than the original, except maybe more of the same. Talking of “more of the same” I hope you are enjoying today’s image of a letter being posted.
Here I am sort of celebrating reaching 100 consecutive days of this project, and yet I wonder why we put such a significance to round numbers? It has become anathema to me on the radio or in papers every time there is some spurious celebration to mark a centenary or more usually just a round number like 40 or 65 or 950. Mostly these numbers have no magical or symbolic significance – a notable exception being a jubilee – it’s just an excuse to sell something. If you have no ideas look up dates or create a top 10/50/100.
Anyway, it’s a pretty good piece and I am glad I used the idea I used rather than the one I originally had in mind. The one I didn’t use needs more consideration and probably more space.
As if it wasn’t enough to create an artwork every day for this project AND put it in an envelope AND print messages on the front of that envelope AND seal the flap with sealing wax AND annotate the back: as if all that wasn’t enough now I have started annotating the front too! What am I doing?
Is it perhaps because it is Friday 13th and full moon? Is it perhaps that it is a hot day and I did some strimming in the garden today and a whiff of petrol and nettle juice mixed with grass pollen has tipped me over the edge? Or is it perhaps that my obsessive nature has got its claws into this project?
Anyway, the offending dot of watercolour could be a clue to what is inside or to the work I did immediately after that kept me from posting it straightaway or I could have just put a spot of paint there as an excuse to annotate the front and write about it on this blog. If nobody buys it you will probably never know.
The other day someone said they enjoyed my Twitter feed as it had a Mornington Crescent feel to it. I sense this blog is going that way!
Again I could have posted this earlier, but having already missed the post I decided to do some drawing before I went to the post box. Of course the later it got the less enthusiasm I had for writing this. Now it is late and I am struggling a bit.
The slight change of plan refers to a committment I made to myself a while back about these pieces, and I found that I no longer wanted to try to develop that idea – at least not today – as it was stifling my creativity at the expense of my obsessiveness. I made a slight change and I’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow and decide then how I move forward with it.
The thing about words is because I love words and words like “steadfast”, “staunch”, “resolute” and “endurance” take me back to reading an old copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships (falling apart and covered with brown paper) that we had when I was a child. Repulse, Renown, Relentless, Dreadnought, Stalwart, Staunch, Indefatigable and Bulwark are names that hold so much power and strength yet as mostly unused in our common language these days. As a child, even with an explanation, it was a long time before I could comprehend the concept of an “iron-clad” vessel: somehow I thought the buoyancy of a wooden ship came from the fact that wood floats and that the weight of metal would cancel it out. I had no problem, however, with the concept of an all metal hull. I probably only have this memory because of the taunts and barbs of my eldest brother at my inability to understand.
Feeling more like my old self again after the draining imprisonment of Dorset Art Weeks but with a new, reinvigorated attitude. So I got No97 done and dusted before lunch. I could have got it in the post for the early collection, but had another piece of work I was keen to get started on straightaway.
As you can see from the image of the back I am reading the Owl Service – and what’s wrong with that? Alan Garner is an interesting writer and I am enjoying it despite the slightly dated setting. Great that he references the Mabinogion while omitting Alison’s mother as a character even though she is present in the house. That’s a bit like me ignoring the existence of an artwork at the centre of this!
