Postcard Art / Postcard Writing

This post is to mark publication of my book of stories inspired by old postcards

I've loved postcards for as long as I can remember. I've also collected them since I was a child. In 1974, I wrote in my diary, 'I put some postcards in my album. I want them to be museum pieces some day.' Well, at the age of twelve I wasn't very realistic about the likely future interest of the world in my album of postcards from my first holiday abroad plus assorted pictures of Victorian girls and boys bought in the giftshop at Bowes Museum (near enough to home for an afternoon's visit), but my collecting instinct was already strong.

A glimpse of one of my boxes of modern postcards...

Since then, my postcard collecting has continued, branching out in various directions. That original set of modern cards has grown, added to with cards from art shows and holidays -- I've sorted them into groups by subject, as you can see above. 

But then there's the older postcards I've bought in job lots at auctions which I haven't entirely got to grips with yet: hundreds of cards (as you can see above), mostly from the 1950s to the 1980s, of holiday destinations, largely in the UK. From these I've started to pick out the treasures, cards which for one reason or another, have a special appeal. I keep these in albums, which I like to rearrange every so often, just like my twelve-year-old self.

Above is a page from the album where I keep cards that I've used in paintings. If you follow me on Instagram (@foundandchosen), you'll perhaps recognise the iceskater in a pink dress -- I use my painting of her as my avatar. I've done paintings of four of the other images you can see here as well (spot them here). 

In this album, above, I keep cards that I use to make digital prints, some already realised and some waiting to be done. I'm fascinated by different postcards of the same place and I like to overlay them to get the effect of changes over time. I've done a post about my overlay prints recently, if you're interested.

Above is a page taken more or less at random out of my big album of postcards which have the potential to inspire stories. I love these so much, and it's these I've used in the book you can see at the top of this post: Blow-Ups: Stories from old postcards. The two postcards of 'Brighton by night' made me imagine a scenario where the man and woman in the two different shots have missed each other on a blind date that their friend has set them up on. Here's the page in the book: 

 

They each send their friend an (imagined) postcard after the disastrous attempt at matchmaking. 

And here's the page in the book inspired by the postcard of Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire (bottom left in the album page): 

Robert and his father -- appreciating Wales

There are fifteen different stories in the book alongside an introduction about my passion for these cards (with a nod to Antonioni's seminal 1966 film Blow-Up) and lots of lovely 'blow-ups' of details from old postcards . If I've piqued your interest, you can buy the book for £12.99 from the foundandchosen Etsy shop or from online retailers such as Waterstones.com, Barnes and Noble or Amazon or you could even order it from a bookshop (ISBN 978-1-9196197-0-5). And thank you so much, if you do!

A spread from my book -- for the sheer loveliness of blown-up litho postcards. You've got to love the dots!

As a postcard-lover, I've also become a collector of books about postcards and postcard art. It wasn't until I went round the house gathering these together for this post that I realised I had quite so many. Naturally I have a copy of Tom Jackson's Postcard From The Past (4th Estate, 2017).

Tom has made finding funny or poignant messages on the backs of old postcards his life's work (by which I mean he excels at it) and his Twitter feed (@pastpostcard) is a constant delight. He also does a lovely podcast, Podcast From The Past, where guests talk about postcards that have special significance to them. Perhaps Tom will have me on there one day...?

My Instagram friend, Michelle Abadie (@majandmaltbydesigns and also @johnhindecollection) is a true postcard aficionado, in particular the glorious output of John Hinde Studios. Above are two of her postcard books, both great. The John Hinde Collection (extended edition, 2020) is just beautiful, with restored prints of the work of Hinde's team of photographers. Nothing To Write Home About (Friday Books, 2007) is an earlier book (with Sue Beale) which gives the reader the enjoyable combination of Hinde postcards and the funny messages written on their backs. I've shown both the back and front of this book, as it cleverly uses a postcard back and front.

Then there's:

A spread from Bizarro Postcards, edited by Jim Heimann (Taschen, 2002)

and, of course:

Martin Parr's Postcards (Chris Boot, 2008)

I feel very in tune with Parr's propensity to sort his postcard collection by theme:

This page is especially pleasing

I like the cover of this 2008 book from Laurence King publishers very much:

The lettering of the title (simply Post Card) is cut out and there are postcard-sized pockets behind so that, if you wish, you can change the book's appearance by slotting in different cards. However, inside it is akin to one of those fairly commercial directories of graphic designers and I don't feel so in tune with the very contemporary designs. Give me an impossibly blue sea and a miniature railway any day.

Incidentally, whenever I find myself desperately trying to flick through an entire box of old postcards on a market stall or at a car boot sale -- with members of my family standing right behind me impatiently tapping their feet -- as a short cut I look for the little strip of blue sky sticking out at the top, a sure sign that the postcard is likely to be one I'll like:

I can see a few likely candidates above -- can you?

What I really need to do, though, is to stop buying more old postcards and thoroughly sort out the ones I've already got -- thousands by now, I suspect. But how to order them? By place? By subject matter? By colour? By their potential for various art projects? The permutations are endless. But I will leave you with the happiness that is my (growing) collection of postcards of the Piramide in Rome...

I feel sure there's a book in here somewhere...

Postcard secrets pinned down

I've been working away on my print series and a few other things for months now, hence the fall off in blogposts. For the last two weekends, I've been framing, framing, framing. Today I decided to photograph everything to get a feel for how the images look all together.

The main series consists of 'secrets' gleaned from old postcards. By 'secrets' I mean details that are not what the eye sees when it takes in the postcard image in the normal way. In some cases the images are barely visible to the naked eye in the original. I've taken these details and reconstituted them as postcards in their own right, complete with the original captions. I feel this link back to the source of the image is important. The images are strange and unexplained, perhaps rendered even more so when presented as picture postcards. I really like the slightly surreal feeling of some of them: strange, fleeting figures or lonely people isolated in a busy scene. I hope other people will like them -- I'm intending to have them for sale at my open studio days in September. They won't be expensive.

This is probably my favourite print.

I like this one too as I was thrilled to find a naked lady caught unawares through a chalet window. She is tiny in the original. (Both the above pics come from the same original postcard, a wonderful find.)

I like this one too. Well, obviously I like them all, as I created them. It's been very satisfying to make them. Here are some more:

That's probably enough images for now. I'll save the other series for another post. I'd love to know if you like them. The photos aren't perfect but that's slightly deliberate to discourage copying.

Craig's Postcard Collection

Because of my renewed interest in art derived from postcards, I've been buying more postcards lately, quite often from international sellers. When the cards come in the post, it seems to be standard practice to slot the bought card in between two giveaway cards, used as stiffeners. Such is my interest in all things postcard that I always hope these extra postcards will have something to recommend them to me as well -- who doesn't love a freebie? But the most recent ones have been rather dull.

Except.... (now, I may be more or less the last person in Western Europe not to be aware of this story, in which case, please smile understandingly and pass on your way...) I noticed that a couple of these postcards were addressed to the same person. One card was from France, one from Hungary. Then I found a third among my collection, from Switzerland. All addressed to the same person, called Craig Shergold.

My mind was racing, thinking, 'What on earth are the chances of that?' I thought I might be able to do one of my research projects on this person, but as soon as I googled his name, I discovered his story. As this is readily findable online, I won't go into too much detail, but when Craig was nine, back in 1989, he became very unwell. Perhaps as a way of cheering him up, his friends and relatives started up a campaign to have so many people send him get-well messages that he would get into the Guinness Book of Records. The campaign was a great success and cards began to pour in from all over the globe. By May 1990 Craig had received over 16 million cards and this was duly recorded as a record in the 1991 Record Book. But the inrush of cards had taken on a life of its own and by May 1991 over 33 million cards had been delivered to that address in Carshalton. Wonderfully, Craig had surgery in America that saved his life and he got on with living it, but the cards just wouldn't stop. By 1998 over 250 million cards had been sent to Craig and the Post Office had had to give his house its own postcode. His family asked the Post Office to stop delivering the cards and they moved house. The request to send Craig a get-well message was like Chinese whispers and got corrupted as it went round and round the planet -- so even the three cards I've pictured have variations in the spelling of Craig's name and address.
     The cards had become a kind of curse, though no doubt everyone who sent them meant well. He wants nothing more than for the deluge of cards to stop -- the total may be as many as 350 million cards by now.
     So it's not such a coincidence that I should own just three out of the 350 million postcards sent to Craig. Cards that arrive for Craig now go straight to recycling. People, it's got to stop!

Saying it with a postcard

I've signed up for Hertfordshire Open Studios for the first time this year. It will take place throughout September 2014 and I feel both excited and apprehensive -- I will be expected to do artist-like things for any visitors (the website where you sign up strongly recommends that you offer demonstrations while your studio is open). That would be quite challenging.
     For now, I'm trying to prepare in good time and part of the preparation is to make some work that people might like to buy without spending a lot of money. I'm working on a series of limited edition digital prints which I'll frame. More on these in a moment.
     Because I'd signed up for the Open Studios, earlier this month I was invited to meet up with other artists whose studios are nearby. We met at a pub. I was, as usual, rather excitable at this prospect. I got to the pub quite early and had to do that thing of walking around, trying to guess which person or group of people was the bare bones of the get-together. It felt a bit like going on a blind date. Nerve-wracking, but when I got to the far end of the large pub and saw a big table with two women sitting quite far apart I guessed that this must be it -- or they had just had a row. I got the right table! Soon there were ten or eleven of us and although there was the usual awkwardness of meeting a group of people for the first time, it was enjoyable. At a certain point someone made a move to hand out their cards and suddenly everyone did the same, there were a few minutes of happy card-swapping and the ice was definitely broken.
     So the get-togethers are going to continue fairly regularly and hopefully friendships will grow out of it (actually some people already knew each other but I didn't know anyone). And the next meeting is coming up already. Last time we discussed something we could do the next time we met and we decided to each bring a postcard of something that has a bearing on our art -- an image of a favourite artwork, whatever we want. This will be a treat for me but it's hard to choose which one to bring: I'm obsessed with postcards. I have about 100 old postcards that I've carefully 'curated' for special qualities I see in them (potential for the sort of art I want to do in relation to them) and I frequently sort through them, again rather obsessively, looking for things I may have missed in them the last time I looked. I was telling my Dad about this activity and he described it as 'forensic', which I think is a very good word for what I'm doing.
     So my postcard for the meet-up is going to have to be a Richard Hamilton. A fortnight ago I went to see the Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern. I've long counted Richard Hamilton among my top ten favourite artists (along with Richter, Rauschenberg, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Warhol, Marlene Dumas, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Wilhelm Sasnal). I've followed him through quite a few different phases of his art, some I've liked more than others, but the work that I do like, I love. I agree with this art critic that he has been lumbered with the title of 'The Father of Pop Art', almost entirely as a result of the collage he made in 1956, 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' and that consequently his work as a whole has perhaps been over-valued, in the sense of taken to be more significant than it is, so made to carry a heavier burden of importance than it needed to. But it was very good to be able to see his work brought together and set out chronologically. It was exciting to see, in moving from one room to another, elements of pop culture almost literally breaking in to Hamilton's rather ascetic, pale, barely there academic paintings about perspective and movement. Suddenly, there were spacemen, baseball heroes and JFK, patched in to a new set of pale academic paintings. Popular culture can be seen shouldering its way in to his art in the early sixties.
     The best part of the show, for me, were the paintings and prints based on postcards. It was wonderful to see them in the flesh when, previously, I think I've only seen them in reproductions. These have been a true inspiration to me. They were done in an era when enlargements had to be done using cumbersome equipment -- no scanners then -- and when Hamilton took a postcard of Whitley Bay, a little seaside town on the North East coast (quite close to where he had a teaching post at the time) and blew up a detail of it by stages, it was an experiment to see how far he could push the process before the 'real life' image broke down into abstraction. He made this foldout work, using a roughly A5-sized reproduction of the postcard, which shows the steps:

I've got the same postcard that Hamilton used:

The area he honed in on is about two thirds of the way down and two thirds of the way across:

This is Hamilton's print based on his close-up:

Bathers, Richard Hamilton, 1968

Over the past few years I've done quite a number of large mixed-media pieces based on old postcards, for instance:

All the above four pictures are about 3' x 4'.The idea was to isolate a 'drama' that was not so apparent in the original postcard, by masking out other figures and objects. I left a ghostly hint of what was once there underneath the pigment. In the third picture down, 'Hyde Centre', most of the right hand side of the original image was taken up by a large tree. I masked it out and recreated the building behind it.
     But currently I'm working on a series of digital prints, as mentioned above. In these I hunt for hidden details and make them into a new 'postcard'. So, for instance, below is a print I've made from the same postcard of Seaton Carew as the first of the above four pictures:

I've found a little girl who looks as though she might be running away. I don't want to upload too detailed a photo of any of my prints because they're digital, and so the image is the artwork -- hence the photo of this one framed, to protect it a little from being reproduced willy nilly. I'm working on lots of different images, but you might have to come along to one of my open studio days to see them properly. I like the quality you get when you go deep into the original image to mine its secrets. Anyway, I hope people will like them. And this is what I'll be talking about at the pub next week, clutching two postcards, one of Whitley Bay and one of a Richard Hamilton blow-up taken from it.