This book used to be a banner that hung on my wall in Marrickville from 2016 – 2018 when I moved back to Newtown.
I didn’t want to / had no space to hang it, but i liked the colours. I’m unable to find it in my blog anywhere. i know I bought the grey/brown paper at Sturt one year, on sale at the art concession at the end of classesIn January 2014, the year i did pochoir. I cannot find it anywhere in the next 6 months of posts. But if i eventuallhy come across it I’ll add it here.
So last week as part of my ongoing clean up and re-evaluation of my paper stocks I cut it into a concertina approximately 11.5 x 12 centimetres. In fact I cut it in 12 centimetre strips, and used Mrtha Stewart scoring board to fold it about 12 centimetres, but metric to imperial and my tendency to not be particularly precise it was a little crooked, so then I trimmed the whole thing.
The original thing had quotes from John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire scrawled on it in ink and pastels.
I added some pictures I cut from Fashion (that book just keeps on giving). Chosen because I liked them, and because they were all of similar size. The women pictured included Audrey Hepburn, Lady Di, Coco Chanel, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland (that was an article about the little black dress), and many other unidentified catwalk models (they may have been identified in the original, but they are now lost to history, until someone AI-identifies them).
It needed something to pull it together, and I chose a quote about opportunities from Hotel New Hampshire:
You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?
John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire
I added a black cover with some internal page offcuts, and went one step further and put a magnetic closure – I’ve been meaning to do this for centuries, and this time I found two appropriate magnets, and it’s done. It just required some good glue.
The images came from this book:
Here are more images of the final work.
