blindness and memory

"Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also be blackness. Through our colours, paints, art and love, we remember that Allah had commanded us to "See"! To know is to remember what you've seen. To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness. The great masters, who shared a love of painting and perceived that colour and site arose from darkness, longed to return to Allah's blackness by means of colour. Artists without memory neither remember Allah nor his blackness. All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within colour and outside time."

my name is red - orhan pamuk

i've been having fun working with this stencil tin, and i sure have a lot of it. i found them in various tanneries in karlovassi and i love the texture and colour the tanneries and time have given them. they also work well for collaging and leafing. the paper i use for collaging i've had for years, was also found in a tannery, its an old ledger written with ink thats gone brown on the thinnest paper, the acidity in the ink tends to disintegrate the paper but it creates beautiful layers when collaged. And i have collaged everything with it - from 2 m x 2m canvases down to box art . Probably one of my most useful and loved finds. the calligraphy is also gorgeous. 

though i've found lots of paper related things i never found another ledger with such thin paper. the only thing that came close was discovering some exercise books from a young girl who was at school prior to and during WW2 - all her books from elementary school to her final year. during the war, what with, i imagine the paper shortage, there are 4 exercise books with very thin yellow paper, mostly written in pencil and the handwriting is tiny compared to the others, with lots of scribbling round the edges and all subjects in one book.