The Cheese is Old and Moldy

I’ve been rescuing family pictures at my parents’ house.  I often find things here or there when I’m helping my mother de-clutter. The best of these I scan and then share. Some of those scanned pictures will inevitably end up in my creative projects. At some point I should ask folks if they want to be included in these projects. I have no audience, it’s fine. What I’m always looking for are little jewels, things that stand out and depict a particular time. One picture that I recently rescued depicted me at the kitchen sink when I was maybe four or five years old. This would have been 1984, or 1985. While my cute ass was front and center, I was more interested in the décor sitting on the counter behind me. Some of that décor I think I dropped off to Goodwill just last year. It’s vintage now.

A couple weeks ago I found a few boxes I hadn’t seen before, hidden boxes. While most of them were in fine shape, all of them were running the risk of being in peril. The barn they live in wasn’t exactly watertight. In fact, one of the boxes was sitting in water. When I picked that box up, all the pictures inside were completely fused together in a giant, gross brick. I pulled apart big clumps of pictures just to get some air to as many I could salvage. When doing this, I could see a face or an arm appear in the obscured in the moldy images. Although I would have preferred them to be in pristine shape, an opportunity presented itself…another project.

Rescued Pictures 

When I got the piles back to my lab (upstairs makings room) I pulled all of them apart and then set them aside to dry. Once they were somewhat dry a day later, I wiped a few of them down with a towel. Mold has a weird feel if you don’t know. It’s not a good feeling, it’s akin to having a cockroach scurry over your big toe. It’s a dirty eerie feeling. When you get mold on your fingers, you’re no thinking about the positives that mold has contributed to the world like cheese or penicillin, you’re just like… “Eww, mold.” With cheese, I never think about respiratory problems, but with mold it starts creeping into the back of your mind as soon as it appears. I turned on fans. I opened a window. If I had a hazmat suit (why don’t I have one) I would have put it on and made the whole operation look spectacular. I got to get a hazmat suit.

When everything dried for another day, I went through them all, picking out the ones that looked the most eye-catching. So many of them were filled with bright purples and blues. So many patterns swirled around the images much like a hippie’s scarf. For many, the figure had completely disappeared, leaving an impressionistic image. The more I looked, the more I thought about Katrina. I flashed back to a museum visit I made somewhere in the world years ago. In one of the exhibits, they displayed family photos that had floated away during the storm. My rescue effort wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but the image that remained was similar.

I scanned 10-15 of the best ones, focusing on the ones that had family members in them, mainly my two nephews. I figured my family might want to see these. Although I had “cleaned” them up as best I could, they were still kind of gross. The ink wasn’t dry, not exactly, leaving some terrible looking stuff on my scanner that was hard to get off. After scanning, I got prints from Walgreen’s. 4x6’s with a 50% off coupon, can’t beat that. Much cheaper and easier than trying to print them on my own. I cut them into pieces while trying to keep distant faces in the background.

The final product is fine. It worked out ok. I had made something new. I’ve realized time and time again that if I have a grandiose plan in place, one that involves many moving parts and that doesn’t randomly come together, the result is only ok, at best. And fast seems to be the best approach. A convoluted concept I think that’s novel never really works out. In the end, the new collages are like a lot like my others, but with just a little more shine from the high-glossy prints. I tried to fix this by sanding the surface of the collage even more than I normally do, but to no avail. The dreaded “line” was still there. It’s always the line. They look good enough. Saw an idea through and here it is. At least I can get rid of these by sending them to family members so they can leave them in some giant pile and forget them.

Onto the next idea. 

The final makings 

 

The USPS Emailed Me Collage Material

The USPS offered a service a few years back. You sign up, and you get an email with rough scans of the mail that’s coming for that day. Not all the mail, it rarely scans anything larger than a letter. Getting the daily mail spoiled for me while doing my chores isn’t great, but it’s also a slight benefit. So much of my time is spent scanning work and ephemera, so having a robot do it for me feels like a nice treat. It’s like I have an assistant. Can I get a mail-art assistant?

Since signing up, I have received these emails daily and downloaded each scan into a folder on my computer. That’s thousands of scans…thousands. Normally I do them in groups of two or three because it’s a tedious process, one that I’ve continued to do for years without any justification for doing so. Day in and day out, I check my email, download the scans, and then do nothing with the images produced. More than once, I’ve questioned why I haven’t done anything with the images and almost stopped collecting them. I pushed through.

They’re not good images. Their quality isn’t easily usable. The files are tiny. You can’t print them as is, anything you need intense detail for, you scan in the conventional sense.

I collected images in this fashion until January 2026 when I started to use them. It was all so simple, like most things. A whim produces a nice result and then a whim turns into an obsession. It was simple, all I had to do was bring up the images and digitally cut out (this means I can do it at work during my downtime, like this piece of useless writing) what I thought was interesting and then post that to a bigger piece. I started with Cohen’s braincells in mind. Little images to create a bigger story.  

The first thing I did was play around with a bunch of Richard C. images, just the front of the envelopes, just what I receive in the daily email. For him, the front of the envelopes contains so much of the work. On the envelopes you can see his unique style which has been honed after decades of making mail art. I put them together in a larger digital collage. After that, I broke some of his often-used motifs into a type of visual glossary. I cut out a bunch of the elements that make up his work, and I gave them a name. I picked the items that I admired most about his work, the most unique, the most striking. 

Richard C. Visual Glossary 

10 Envelopes Digitally Collaged 

 

As these things go, you do the thing repeatedly to see what you can learn from repetition. I went through my list of over 800 digital scans direct from the USPS and picked out things that stuck out to me and then dropped those into another creation. This could go on forever. A new toy to play with. While I started with Cohen in mind, I’m thinking about moving more towards Klaus Voorman’s Revolver cover. 

Can you find yourself?

 

 

Flyleaves Are My Flygirls: Making Rotting Paper Dance

New paper has little personality. There’s something uninteresting about a pristine piece of paper. It’s like a face without any discernible scars. There’s no life to a brand-new piece of paper. No story. No history.

Ever since I started making collages in a pop-Schwitters style (just thought of that, seems on point) I’ve looked out for old pieces of paper. When everyone has access to the same materials the creations end up looking similar. I’m not a collage maker that does intricate cuts or peculiar shapes; I mostly work with rectangles or squares where all the images touch one another. For me, making collages like this, with new and vibrant paper, the senses get overloaded. Too many new colors make the collage look like a high school project. You know, one of those ice breaker activities meant to introduce someone’s animated personality. Look, over there is Kelly Kopawski and beside her is an image of my favorite chip, Pizzarias.

Over time I’ve focused on flyleaves. Flyleaves (also called front-free-endpages) are the blank pages of a book that normally come directly before a title page. I find my flyleaves in the giant free bins at my local bookstore. I go there every week and tear out the flyleaves, as many as I possibly can. Sometimes you get two or three “blank” pages with every book since they’re at the start and at the end. I take the pages I want and toss the rest of the book back into the bin. Catch and release. Since I’m not really looking for content, it doesn’t matter what the focus of the book is. I simply dig around for books that look old. The condition is unimportant too. Because I’m looking for discarded trash, I can leave the bookstore with twenty or more pages that’s eventually going to end up in a landfill or a hoarder’s paradise if I don’t take them. Flyleaves from long forgotten 19^th century novels, weird encyclopedias, and hate-filled religious texts end up walking out the doors with me.

Time is what makes these pages unique.

There’s something beautiful about a book that has been in a poorly ventilated basement for fifty years, a book riddled with water damage, a book that held up the end of a cheap couch since Eisenhower was in office. The pages have dents and ruts and rot and mold. Art supply stores seem leery of mold and rot and that weird smell that old books get. If it doesn’t smell, I don’t want it. They always smell. My car smells. If the good people at Jovan Musk started making a fragrance called bibliosmia, I’d buy it.

Although almost all these pages start out white, time changes them in unique ways. Some paper is thicker than others which causes unique changes compared to very thin, newspaper-like papers. Things yellow in different ways and at different intervals. Texture is important. Paper from books printed in other countries will have a different feeling than from cheap books published in the US. There are bumps in paper and cuts. Whenever I finish a collage, I go over it with sandpaper. Doing this brings the composition together. All that paper mixed and cut and reassembled, some from a book published in 1897, some from Soviet-era guidebook, and some from cheap pulp novels, react in contrast to one another. The paper is essentially the same color, but on closer inspection there are tiny inconsistencies that come out. If you’re willing to look closely, you can see how all of it clashes into a new thing.

Can you smell it?

I’ve broken the most common types of flyleaves into four different categories. I did this for you.

Blank

The most common type of flyleaves are the blank ones. These are the ones that people have not really touched. They have the least personality but make up the bulk of the pages I rip from books. Although blank, that does not mean the paper hasn’t picked up a lot of “personality” from the time it was first printed. Oxidation is key. 

  

Distressed

This one is my favorite. Distressed flyleaves are truly the most idiosyncratic of them all. Look at this page, right here, there’s a long strip of yellowing on the right side. This takes time, decades and with little interference from other people. You can’t buy this piece of paper new. Dead center, both at the bottom and at the top, you can see where a piece of tape has corroded the page. Paper clips are also common, so are pieces of cut-out bits that have been stuck inside as a bookmark. When the piece of paper sits in there for decades, it makes a permanent impression on the paper. 

 

Scribbles

Scribbles are most found in textbooks or books that kids like to mess around with. Kids draw in books, they make notes, and so often they practice writing their names. There are more than a few textbooks I’ve found filled with long lists of a child’s name slightly different from the example above. It’s like they’re practicing signing autographs at an awards show. Scribbles done in pencil always look the best. Over time the marks smudge, and move, giving the handwriting a ghostly quality. 

 

Library

Although libraries purport to care the most about books, you can always tell a library book from a non-library book. Libraries like dropping in fun little stickers with the name of the library or the type of book, or those ugly barcodes. Often these books are discarded and sold at library sales, a major source of my joy. I always pull out any page that has the word “DISCARD” on it. Sometimes this is written and sometimes it’s rubberstamped. Sometimes you get “WITHDRAWN”, but I don’t like that word as much, too long. None of these marks matter when compared to best of library defacement, the “DUE BACK” stamp. Nothing is more beautiful than this. I can look at these all day long, whether they’re lovingly rendered in a straight line or presented sloppily like they are here. Whenever I get a beautiful due back page, I always look at the dates to see how loved the book was. This one was loved. 

 

Find, rip, cut, reassemble, mail.