{"id":34322,"date":"2026-02-21T10:23:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T09:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.maritspaperworld.com\/blog\/?p=34322"},"modified":"2026-02-21T10:23:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T09:23:03","slug":"something-old-something-new-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maritspaperworld.com\/blog\/something-old-something-new-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Something old, something new…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>” and we made a start.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

“<\/h1>\n

Hi Pamela,
\nAfter we met and agreed to do “something” creative together, you came up with the first prompt: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Something OLD<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n