The 5th String Spoiler

I found a couple of nice items at the dump this morning. I especially like the geometric frame, and the look of the title heading type. I might have to read this from the beginning.

This jacket will make something nice some time.

Revere Beach

Well, I couldn't find my chicken postcard. I'm not done looking, but just in case, here are a few from Revere, Massachusetts that I found just in time for PFF (Postcard Friendly Friday).

Actually, you won't find me there. As a kid, I was dying to go. Revere Beach was fascinating to me. The arcades were amazing and much more crowded than at Salem Willows where we went for family outings. There were live gypsy fortune tellers! (My favorite halloween costume.) The roller coaster was WAY bigger. But my mother would not allow it. A couple of times on our way back from Boston my father drove through but he wouldn't stop the car.

The reverse of these are all the same. I assume they are fairly recent reproductions. The edges are nearly perfect and the tone of the paper looks like it was chosen to look old.

Domes of Silence

Here's another item from the downstairs curio cabinet. You can just catch the corner in the banner photo way over to the left.

The image of the woman will definitely find a place in a collage one day soon. I can just picture some housewife with a French temper hammering them onto everyone's chair to keep the racket down when the family converges at mealtime!

Someone told me you can still get these at the hardware store, but they cost a lot more than 10 cents for a box!

One Year Blog Anniversary

I started this blog I call "AnitaNH: Collage & Life" one year ago today with a post titled Jumping Into Something New. I must admit that I really enjoy writing about my creative life here, and I hope those of you out there who check in from time to time enjoy reading about it.

Op Granny Square

Elements From Old Books

Found some interesting items this morning at the dump. My favorite is the neat illustration of a Coding Tube. "This new electronic device transforms speech samples into seven-digit codes."

Plus this beautiful book jacket illustration by Irving Miller:

And a couple of nice paperback covers:

I've already started cropping and chopping in Photoshop to create interesting elements:

Beverly, Mass. - Part III

I'm so glad that I published all of the old post cards from Beverly. I got to participate in something called "Postcard Friendly Friday" which is organized by Marie Reed over at The French Factrice, her vintage postcard blog. And I was even contacted by the Beverly Citizen newspaper regarding my post.

One thing I learned today is that the business side of the postcard is also important! So here are a few of the most interesting ones:

I mentioned the Lynch Park lions in Part II. You can see a nice postcard view of them guarding the rose garden. I found it on a site called Primary Research: Historic Beverly Postcards and Images.

They also have this view of Woolworth's on Cabot Street. I love the trolley and the long dresses on the women! And here's a woman in summer white at Dane Street Beach.

Here's an interesting photo of President Taft's summer residence being moved on a barge.

There's even a shot of the construction of Rte. 128 - my old commute from hell!

From the North of Boston Library Exchange, here's a more recent shot of Beverly Plaza . One of those cars in the parking lot could be my mothers. We shopped at Star Market a lot!

I'm intrigued by this shot of the Beverly Reservoir. I believe the flat-topped hill in the distance is Folly Hill. Amazing if it is. I spent lot's of time up there after my parents moved to Danvers. Their house was just over the other side of Folly Hill on Bradley Road. Kids would slide down the grassy slopes on pieces of cardboard and cross under Rte. 128 via a cow tunnel to get to Cherry Hill Farm.

Here's another photo of the gardens at Lynch Park. If you walked up those brick stairs to the right you would be on the ocean. It was such a beautifully mysterious spot, always quiet and cool. The record to this photo includes the note: "Italian Garden at David S. Lynch Memorial Park. Mrs. Marie Evans had the gardens constructed on her estate in 1910 after she removed the home which she rented to President William Howard Taft for the Summer White House in 1909 and 1910."

Here's an amazing aerial view of Beverly's waterfront (published by the Wakefield Trading Company of Wakefield, Mass.) and I can see the yellow billboard near the fork in the road with the house that was my parent's on Cabot Street across the street to the right.

And two other nice aerials: Cabot Street and Broadway.

I can't believe that I'm only on page 32 of 51. I'll have to come back to this another time. I'll add a link for NOBLE to the list on the right. Here's an image in closing: lovely Library Ladies of 1913.

OK, just this one more, a beautiful hand-colored bird's eye view of Beverly from the collection "Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929," part of the American Memory project of the Library of Congress.

Beverly, Mass. - Part II

It's nice to look at these old Beverly photos again. I forgot that I had so many of them tucked away! As a kid, one of my favorite places to go was Lynch Park. There were two beaches, one sandy one which was nice for swimming, and the other rocky one was great for catching crabs. The best thing was the garden, surrounded by a brick wall and guarded by twin lion statues. Dawson Hall burned down before the days that I would take my daughter there.

The view at Hospital Point made it a nice place to go parking. I did a watercolor of the view in daylight when I was in junior high . . . my first and last attempt at both watercolor and plein air painting!

This next item was tough to locate but once I started looking at the post cards I had to find it. It's something that I have been saving since high school. I almost "decoupaged" it to a pine board back then. . . glad I didn't. The Whitman building was right across the street from the house on Cabot Street.

Here are my mother and I in the front yard with the brick Whitman building in the background. The back of the photo is dated Aug. 1955. If you followed the road to the left you would come to the Salem-Beverly Bridge.

I have met a number of people from Beverly in my shop over the years. It seems that this area of New Hampshire attracts folks from the North Shore!

Beverly, Mass. - Part I

I was born in Beverly, Massachusetts and lived in my parent's house on Cabot Street until age 5.

The house was a stone's throw away from the Salem-Beverly Bridge. The next view is the "down town" area of Cabot Street.

I moved back to Beverly in 1976 and lived briefly in a 3rd floor apartment on Broadway before moving to a small cape on Essex Street where I lived until I moved to New Hampshire in 1996.

My house on Essex Street was right down the street from the Beverly Public Library where I first began my self-education in art.

The old high school across the street from the library was part of North Shore Community College and I had signed up for an adult education course in greeting card illustration there. Unfortunately, the teacher became ill so the course was cancelled.

John Mutchler, Jr. Artist & Photographer

Here's a nice oval format portrait by artist and photographer John Mutchler, Jr. He's listed in the Dolgeville, N.Y. phone book listings dated May, 1917. The photographer's imprint is on the back:

The Piano Girl

Here is an old photo from my curio cabinet. It was found inside the used player piano that my folks purchased so I could have lessons back in sixth grade.

You can see her in my banner photo for this blog, along with this other old photo:

It's funny that I never noticed how her cheeks were tinted pink until viewing the enlarged scan!

Here's a view of the back of the photo:

Her name has been written in pencil: Kate Lewis, maybe. I can't quite make it out.

New Hundertwasser Link

I should know better than to put the word "new" on any of my pages but there it is next to Hundertwasser under my Artist Links. I am excited to have found a few images hitherto unseen by me!

The first is titled Talks With The Beyond (Etching, Vienna, 1984). The square windows and the patchwork of the fenced-in area (a cemetery?) are like a patch-work quilt. I love that amazing dotted yellow sky. . . I don't think I can link directly to the image but you can see it on this page about his graphic work, bottom left. And the one right above it titled Il Rotolante - This Is A Creeper (Photolithograph/Silk screen, Venice, 1983) is pretty intense, also.

Another image I love is titled Singing Steamer in Ultramarine III (Mixed media, Paris, 1959). It's the long horizontal with primary colors, dots and squares on this page about his painting. He never used an easel, and sometimes painted on found objects. Examples at the bottom of the page, Switch Board (Mixed media, Porquerolles, 1980) and Pellestrina Wood (Painted wood assemblage, Hahnsäge, 1988) can be enlarged to see nice detail.

Don't miss this whole page of spirals showing two more favorites: The I Still Do Not Know (Mixed media, La Picaudière, 1960) and Close-Up of Infinity - Tagore's Sun (Mixed media, Kaurinui/Vienna, 1994). The spiral motif is an expression of transautomatism, founded by Hundertwasser, who believed that straight lines are 'godless and immoral.'

Well, that gives me something to think about, as does Hundertwasser on Hundertwasser where he states: "Paintings for me are gateways, which enable me, if I have been successful, to open them into a world which is both near and far for us, to which we have no admission. . ."

Fame According to Andy

I quoted Andy Warhol over on Facebook this morning: "In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Well, I feel famous today! Read the interview about my collage art that was published this morning on Marty Weil's blog, Ephemera: Exploring the World of Old Paper.

Marty has featured some tempting potential collage materials as found on eBay like these old underground newspapers from San Francisco's hippy counter-culture.

The illustration above is from my Zinc Pennies series. And the ones below are from The Mandrake Project, the result of trying to achieve animation in Photoshop. . . getting closer all the time. I actually got one sequence to move, but not quite as I had intended!

Who Knew?

The truth is, I feel like a moron. I saw a copy (as in only copy; just one single copy) of Death of An Author by E. C. R. Lorac without a dust jacket over on Biblio. I won't even say what it's worth here, but you can click on the link to see how absolutely stupid I was to have the same book complete with jacket in my hand only to remove said jacket and put the book back.

I looked for it this morning but it was gone. Let's hope someone more astute than I latched onto it before it landed in the paper dumpster. The trip was not a total waste as I did manage to save a couple of interesting items from a similar dumpster fate.

Trash to Treasure

There is something satisfying in finding vintage collage materials like this old book jacket for free! I also picked up a nice copy of A Dictionary of the Bible by Davis to add to my dictionary collection. It certainly was cold at the dump this morning. Time to find my gloves!

Here are a couple of cool paperback covers:

And in closing, a recap of the details: