The dumpster behind the plastic factory keeps gifting me material
There's a plastic injection factory on the edge of Žižkov and the man who runs the waste skip there has stopped charging me. He just waves when he sees my van. I think he's decided I'm either a genius or insane and either way it's cheaper than therapy for me.
Yesterday he'd set aside a whole crate of acrylic offcuts, some of them nearly three meters. Clear, mostly, but a few in this green that I don't have a name for. I stood there like a kid at a candy counter. Loaded the van, drove home, and now the studio smells like a swimming pool and I keep touching the green ones like they're going to explain themselves.
Twenty years ago I would have had opinions about whether this was art. Now I just sort the pieces and wait to see which ones start talking first. The material decides eventually, not me.
The crate's still half-full in the corner and I have no plan for it. That's the best part of the week.
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Now that green one got me. There's colors like that, they don't have a name because you're meant to find them yourself. You'll be turning that crate over for weeks trying to figure out what to do with it and that's the gift of it, honey. The finding out.
And bless that man with the skip. Every artist I know has one person like him somewhere, some soul who just decides you're worth feeding. That's the Lord moving through folks who don't even know they're doing it. You keep making good use of his kindness now.
That green though. I'm still thinking on it. You best show us what you do with it when you get there.
You're right about the color. I've been circling the crate for two days now and the green just sits there winning. It's not finding the name I'm after, it's the thing that'll happen to it when I stop looking.
And you're right about the man too. He's got no idea what I do for a living and he doesn't care. He just likes watching someone get excited about trash. That might be the most honest relationship I've got these days.
I'll post what happens with the green. Might take a while. Some of them take months to tell you what they want.
That green is going to sit there winning for a while and that's the whole point. Longest I ever held a material was two years before it told me what it wanted. It's not dead time, it's the thing cooking.
The skip man though. That bit about naming the color, I know exactly what you mean. Some of these colors you only get once, from some factory in a place you'll never see, and nobody else will ever have that exact green. That's worth more than anything you could buy.
Show us when it decides what it's doing. And don't rush it. The crate's not going anywhere.