Friday, January 14, 2011

What I Like

What I like: Scuff marks on the floor, skid marks on the street, torn and wet discarded children's drawings, piles of old abandoned magazines, aged advertisements for cakes and cars or shaving lotion, the stack of Hebrew grammar books from the 1940s I once found tossed in the middle of a Tel Aviv street, perfectly-made objects that have no apparent use, empty cigar boxes, blocks of beeswax, rusted bits of torn metal, logos for companies that no longer exist, typography, doodles, footprints, cyphers (and ciphers), the artworks of Joseph Cornell, Jasper Johns and Ray Johnson in that order, the possibilities of sandpaper, steel wool and a year's weather on one of my canvases, the act of finding something completely unwanted (and apparently useless), taking it home, applying some glue or paint, a bit of cutting and shaping, and marrying it with some other orphaned bit of the world and witnessing this Pinocchio-like Lazarus rise to let me know what I might need to know. I like spelling with scissors, my handbook of everything, the collage of people doing what they do (often nothing)...and working whatever little magic I have to refashion the unmistakable into something mysterious.  One of each of everything.

What I don't like:  Loud yabbering about the obvious.

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