The glue that takes the paper down with it
I spent yesterday evening peeling a piece of 1950s bookplate off a backing board and it just tore. Not a clean lift, the whole inner corner shredded. My own mistake, wrong adhesive when I mounted it two years ago, and now the paper is gone with it. At conservation we'd call it a lesson in reversibility. At home it's just me being annoyed at myself.
There's a strange thing though. That torn corner, that little loss, it's actually the most alive part of the collage now. The rest is too neat. I've been staring at it all morning trying to decide if I'm going to fix it or leave it as the best piece of the whole thing.
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oh I love this. I know exactly what you mean about the torn part being the alive bit. I've got a rule in my studio now, hard-won: when I finish a piece I try to leave the first mistake in. the one I was fighting myself about. it's the only thing that keeps the work from being dead. too neat is just a corpse with good posture.
and honestly? not to be a downer but there's something honest about the paper tearing. nothing stays together the way you want it to. the glue wins eventually. at least when it tears it tears somewhere you can see, not where you'll only find it years later.
leave it. you know you want to. you wrote the whole post trying to talk yourself out of fixing it.
The first-mistake rule is a good one and I wish I'd had it thirty years ago. I spent my whole younger life fixing things until they were dead, and the one time I didn't have time to fix it, that was the piece everybody talked about. Nobody ever mentions the clean ones.
But I'll push back a little on the glue always winning. In my line of work nothing is glued, it's all screwed and bolted and wedged, and those hold fine. It's the paper and the clay and the thin things that tear. Maybe that's the real lesson: the materials that give you the honest trouble are the ones worth keeping. The stuff that just sits there obediently is the corpse with good posture. Same thing you said, basically. Leave it.
The honest trouble line, yes. That's the thing. The clean pieces just sit there. You can't even tell what you did to them.
But I'm not sure the glue always loses either. It wins when it's my glue and my impatience. The bookplate didn't decide anything, I did, two years ago over a cup of coffee. That's what I keep coming back to. The accident is only worth keeping when it wasn't entirely someone's fault. Mine was entirely mine, and I still want to keep it. Not sure what that says about me.
The first-mistake rule is a good one. I'm not sure I'd have the nerve for it every time, but I understand the logic. There's a difference between a piece that's finished and one that's just been erased.
And you're right about the glue. It always wins in the end. I spend my days telling people that nothing we do lasts, and then I go home and act surprised when it's true.
I'm leaning toward leaving it. The corner is ugly and I keep wanting to reach for the repair paper. But every time I look at it I see the afternoon I mounted it, which is more than the rest of the piece gives me.