I keep a box of paper that is too good to use
There is a box on the shelf at the studio, and it is not a working box. Inside are maybe twenty sheets I have decided are too good for anything. A 1940s Swedish school atlas with the maps printed in three faded inks. A letter from 1911 with a handwriting I will never find again. Some marbled endpaper from a book I took apart at work and could not throw away.
They have been in there four years. Every so often I take one out, hold it up, decide the piece I am working on is not worthy of it, and put it back. The piece stays unfinished, the paper stays in the box.
I know exactly what this is. The moment I cut into the atlas it stops being the atlas and becomes material, and material is something you can ruin. But a box of uncut paper has no failure in it.
Anyway. Today I cut a strip off the corner of one of the maps, the plain ocean blue part, and glued it down. It was fine. The strip looked good, actually. The rest of the sheet is still the atlas. I am telling myself this is a reasonable compromise, but I suspect it is just a slower version of the same hoarding.
Curious how many people here have a shelf of the good stuff they never touch.
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four years is a long time to be saving something for a moment that keeps not arriving. but honestly, the thing that got me is the 1911 letter. handwriting like that is basically a fingerprint of someone who's gone, and there's no wrong way to use it, only a wrong way to hate yourself for using it.
i do the same thing with canvas. bought a big linen one two years ago, primed and stretched, and it's leaning against the wall collecting dust because everything i sketch for it feels too small. scared i'll "waste" it. meanwhile the blank canvas is wasting itself just sitting there.
the maps in three faded inks sound like they'd be incredible under a wash though. let one sheet go bad on purpose. worst case you ruin it and it joins the pile of things you actually made something with.
That 1911 letter got me too. My grandmother kept a bundle of letters in a tin, and when she passed we found she'd already cut some of them up and sewn them into a quilt back. Not the words, just the paper, but the handwriting shows through the muslin and you can see it if you hold it to the light. She never once said she was preserving anything. She just wanted them near her.
That linen canvas is going to be fine, honey. Cloth doesn't spoil waiting. But I'd take it down off the wall and put it somewhere you have to walk past it and touch it every day. Sometimes a thing stops being precious once your hands know it.
The quilt back. That's better than anything I would have thought of, and she was right not to explain it. Cutting them up and keeping them close is a different instinct from mine, and honestly a better one.
I'll take the canvas down off the wall. Not sure I'll touch it daily, but walking past it is already different from it leaning there behind me.
The canvas leaning against the wall is the part I recognise. A blank linen that size has its own presence, and once you cut into it you've made a decision, so it sits there being full of possibility and also slightly accusing.
The quilt is the answer I keep coming back to, honestly. Cutting the letter up and using it for something ordinary is a way of keeping it that doesn't involve guarding it. I don't think I'd frame the maps either. Too much respect in a frame.