Last year, I met Pamela, a former online student of mine, in person. She was in Middelburg for the day, and we met at a cafe. We had coffee and flipped through each other’s art journals. Because we felt a click, we decided to collaborate on some sort of art project. It took some time to find a way that would work, but after the holidays, Pamela came with the theme “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” and we made a start.

When I finished, I send Pamela the photos with a guiding letter in which I explained my work and methods. To show you the process and results I guess I best translate that letter for you:

“

Hi Pamela,
After we met and agreed to do “something” creative together, you came up with the first prompt: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. It didn’t take me long to agree on this theme for our first project because I immediately saw the potential of ‘old’. In my atelier, I keep a small box containing tiny scraps of old archive documents. At work, during restoration, I sometimes come across tiny pieces of paper whose origins are no longer clear. I do re-attach larger, torn pieces to the original in the right place, but these small pieces, sometimes with just a single letter visible, are untraceable and end up in the trash. Except when I find them, ’cause I take these orphaned pieces home with me and put them in a box.

Because the scraps are so small, I immediately thought about working on very small collages, and I had to make four of them. A ‘quadritch’. A few years ago, I made a few of those small collages and I always found it enjoyable and satisfying to create on such a small surface. Those collages often ended up in series of three and I felt like doing something similar for our first project. I had a nice, thick piece of watercolor paper lying around. I tore a strip from it, which I then divided into four pieces. Each piece is approximately 7,5 x 12 cm and these pieces served as the basic background. You can clearly see the torn edges…

I focused on “old, new, borrowed, and blue” in each collage. While working on each collage I deliberately didn’t think about the next one or the fact that I wanted them to be a series, because if I did, I might start thinking about a “procession” and immediately limit myself in material or color choices. I numbered the pieces of watercolor paper on the back so I would work in the correct order (that is: “correct tear edges in order”) and created them one by one. I thought that afterwards, when I’d finished them all, I would automatically find the coherence in the series.

Something OLD

I choose two tiny pieces of old archival material to start with (I’d guess the paper/parchment is from the 17th or 18th century) and then I delved into my boxes of scraps of paper; they had to be OLD scraps of paper. I found a lot of them. I finally created a composition with the following:

• A piece of parchment with some faint, old Dutch text still visible.
• A scrap of paper with some ink/parts of letters still visible.
• A larger piece of yellowish paper that is almost falling apart from its age and softness.
• A tiny piece of blue wallpaper from the hallway of my childhood home.
• A piece of torn cheesecloth, given to me by an artist friend I met when I had just moved back to Middelburg (2014).
• A red strip of paper cut from an old cigarette pack, from a box of empty cigarette packs my father collected as a teenager in the 1950s and which he gave me to use.

Something NEW

In December, I ordered a few square punches and two stamp punches. I used these for the first time to punch out the pieces of paper for this collage so it couldn’t be “newer”…

The clean squares have an architecturally “modern” feel, so I chose to punch plain coloured pieces of paper. I punched the pieces from a page of a Snoecks book/magazine. I have volumes of Snoecks issues and I chose to flip through the one from 2001 because that was the year that my beloved and I bought a house and moved in together.

A white line ran across a mainly black colored page and I punched out sections where the black area would move slightly while the white line continued.

Something BORROWED

I had to puzzle over the “borrowed” thing for a bit… who could I borrow something from, and what? I quickly came up with “tools,” which I could then also give back… but my beloved and I are two in our household, and everything is shared, so “borrowing” within the walls of our house doesn’t seem like “borrowing”… until I dove into his desk drawers! Look… I found an old toy car!

“Honey, can I borrow that?”

“Um, for what? OK, yes, but I do want it back.”

Exactly, that was the point!

I smeared some brown paint on my palette, drove the car through it, and then across my paper. Look… tire tracks!

Something BLUE

The ‘blue’ was quickly found. I love drawing ‘stones’ on that thick watercolor paper, I even have a special journal bound with thick watercolor paper to fill with paintings of ‘cairns’ (There is a lot to find and read about ‘cairns’, structures of stacked stones, on the internet. In principle: Cairn is a modern Scottish term, a corruption of carne, which was already used in the sixteenth century to indicate a prehistoric construction. Carne itself comes from the Gaelic carn = “heap of stones”).

The pile of three blue stones (or, if you prefer, eggs – because that’s what it looks like too) turned out well and to my liking, but the painting was still missing something… so I splashed and splattered some more with the paint which caused that ‘streamer of splatters’… oops!

This is the series as it lay on my desk, and I knew it wasn’t finished yet… although you can see from the tear lines that the four pieces fit together, the whole thing feels disjointed.

I left it as it was and only revisit it with a fresh eye a week later. I’d already figured I’d have to tie it all together by using the same color and/or technique throughout the collages, but how? It couldn’t be anything with color (too flashy and distracting). So, black. Stamps? No. Thin lines with a pen? No. I grabbed my trusty old sewing machine: black stitching would add extra shape and texture. I set the stitch to zigzag and sewed a line here and there.

For each piece, I looked for the right spot in the composition to add stitching, and—hooray!—I was also able to conceal that “splattered” string by stitching over it. I used the same size zigzag stitch on each collage. My intention was to pull all the end threads through to the back and weave them in, but when I placed the four pieces side by side with the threads still hanging out, I thought it looked fantastic so that I decided to let them hang.

Here’s the finished series.

“

I know Pamela was pleased with the outcome, and I know she herself created something completely different (which wasn’t surprising ’cause when two people create with a same theme, the outcome usually is quite different.) but she has to show that for herself if she wants to. You can find Pamela’s art on instagram.