Entry 582 — Ten-Year Mathemakuical Triptych
Kathy Ernst a long time ago was kind enough to commission a work of mine for to hang in her husband’s place of business. When I dawdled, she suggested I send them my “Mathemaku for Tom Phillips,” which I had done, partly in water color, at the Atlantic center of Art in 2011, and Kathy had taken a liking to. I wanted to send her something new, though, that would fit her husband’s scientific/technological business. So I worked up a triptych. There was one big problem with it: I had to make it in pieces because my computer was too small to hold an image the size I wanted this to be (eleven by seventeen inches). At length, I printed all the pieces involved, intending to make three collages. At that point I got collagist’s block. That lasted six or more years–until today. Today I got it on disk. It only took two or three hours of work. Ridiculous. Of course, I haven’t had it printed yet, but I feel optimistic that it will look okay. Here’s the third frame, which is what it originally looked like except for a few very small changes:
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Friday, 2 December 2011, 9 A.M. The big news of today is that last night or this morning, while I was lying in bed between periods of sleep, I realized that now the I had a computer with much more storage space than my previous one had, I could make decent copies of the frames of my “Triptych for Tom Phillips” and have them printed from a CD at Staples. I’ve already made copies of the images I’ll be using–only to discover I already had better copies in a computer file. All that exhausted me. Time for a nap.
No nap. Little done until I finally went back to work on the Phillips piece. I finished it at just after two. When I started putting it together, I thought it a dazzling summation of my whole life. Halfway through it, I told myself I ought to finish it despite how worthless it was. It’ll probably look okay framed, though.
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