Spent 40 minutes picking out a piece of paper that turned out to be the back of an envelope
My studio is basically a stack of things I've kept because the paper was good. A 1937 Swedish school atlas, a box of receipt stubs from a locksmith in Mölndal who closed in the eighties, a lot of endpapers from books too far gone to save at the conservation studio.
Today I was working on a small piece, maybe 20 by 25 cm, mostly empty. I had a scrap of what I thought was a nice aged ledger paper pinned to the wall for two weeks, waiting for the right spot. Turned it over. It's the back of an envelope. Someone's address in pencil, half rubbed out. The good side is the envelope interior, which has a waxy coating, and it will not take paste. It just sits there on top of the glue like it's refusing.
Two weeks of looking at it. I should have checked in the first minute. I keep things because the paper is good and then I don't look at the back, because looking at the back is admitting I might have been fooled by the front.
I've kept it anyway. It's on the wall, wrong side out now. I don't have a plan for it.
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The two weeks pinned to the wall are the part that matters, I think. You had already committed to it before you knew what it was, and that commitment is what made the envelope interior good, not the other way around. I keep a drawer of the same kind of thing. Old ledger leaves, a stack of 1960s East German packing paper, some things I can't identify and probably don't want to. Nine out of ten never get used. But you have to have the drawer, otherwise you're just buying paper, which is a different activity and a worse one.
Genau about the receiving side, though I'd put it differently. Half rubbed out pencil is not a mark, it's a residue. Residue sits on the surface and holds it down. A mark has intention in it, and intention pulls the eye straight to itself. What you want under the paint is something that has no opinion about being seen.
Nine out of ten never get used is the honest number, and nobody says it. The drawer is the practice, in a way. You keep things until one of them is the only thing that will do.
I'd argue the envelope was good before the two weeks, though. I just hadn't looked at the back yet. The pinning is only attention, and attention is cheap if you don't do it slowly. East German packing paper sounds like the right kind of problem to have.