Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Writing postcards.


When my niece's mother-in-law died, my niece presented me with a smallish cardboard box covered in gold paper. Maybe stationery had come in it, maybe candy, there was no indication of it's original usage, but inside it was an assortment of old postcards. Some were those linen surface ones, some were hand tinted, many were quite boring and left me wondering "who would want a postcard of a parking lot in rural North Carolina?" Some were in multiples, like the apartment complex in Tidewater, Virginia, or the Observatory in Chesapeake, Virginia. I'm so happy to have these cards. Tonight, I wrote 8 of them to service people on support mission in Haiti, one to PostMuse, and one to my daughter (which showed a photo of the place she went to school.) I like thinking of what to write on each card that relates to the image. In most cases, the cards are from locations I've never been to, or ever will be, like Luray Caverns. No cavern for me, thank you. One visit to the catacombs in Paris was enough subterranean for me for a lifetime.

2 comments:

phonelady said...

wow what an awesome find I would have been giddy with that . caverns ? dont like caverns huh ?

VioletSky said...

I love sorting through old postcards, they are so different form the one made today.

There is also a book of boring postcards (possibly more than one volume, by now) and a flickr site of boring postcards that I enjoy visiting every now and the! Maybe you could join

How did I get into this?

I was asked when I started doing Mailart. Good question. Like many artists, I was making and mailing art without even knowing it had a name ...