Time is a Painter

I remember the smell of it the most. Growing up a child of antique dealers I spent a lot of time in barns. Cloistered stacks of mismatched chairs. Bent cardboard boxes of plates wrapped in newspaper. Glass and brass doorknobs bereft of station catching sunlight from dirty dormer windows.

There is a smell to it. Dust, yes, but also wet stone and old carpet and the buttery, aged smell of old paper. Minwax. Solvents. All bundled up in a smell that says old and surplus and sacred.

There is a bit of sacrilege in these spaces. Items of personal value, deprived of their person, and left to gather dust. As a child walking down the narrow aisles I felt towered over. Their previous owners looking down at me, telling me not to bump anything, to not touch.

I have a steamer trunk in my studio from one of those barns in my childhood. It holds oil, paper, mat board, and the beginnings of work that will someday exist as not just ideas in my head.

The inside of the trunk is still lined with the fabric it came with. A blue on white floral pattern that now serves as the substrate for a topographic map of stains, and patina. The warp and weft of time wrinkled fabric making mountain ranges across its surface.

There is magic here too. In this interplay between man made intention and the chaos of time and circumstance. The pattern on its own is interesting, but it is the intersection of it and the stains that have come to inhabit it that make it singular.

I think I look for this in my own work. The uneven distribution of dye when rubbed into the surface of leather. The estuaries and tidemarks of wet chemistry brushed on heavy paper. Opportunities for collaboration with chance to make something greater than I could have on my own. Work that speaks of my carefully patterned intention and the mottled and frayed edges of the life that brought me here. The humility of ideas tarnished by reality but the more beautiful for their imperfections.

A small bit of that childhood magic found in hushed and dusty spaces.