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