To Have and To Hoard

I am a bum with a soft spot for lost things. Lost things to make other things with. I believe in second lives, third lives even; an object’s character comes from age and use. Like an old fork, faded spots where most people grip, oil fingers stabbing food to mouth, minor teeth marks and chips from being dropped on the ground. Floral decoration at the end, crevices blackened in contrast to clean iron. Not just any fork, this fork.

My bedroom is made for two people, but I fill it out myself. In all the corners are cardboard boxes of unusual proportions, tall thin boxes I can fit in, like cheap coffins or suitcases for carrying many long panels down the street. I keep crates that stack up and become a portable studio, easy to bus with, especially ones with cryptic geometric designs on the bottom that would make nice stencils, pop crates my mother used to stock her vending machines in dad’s warehouse. There are nine blocks of Styrofoam in various sizes stashed behind my Lay-Z-Boy, for packing fragile things or even just to make form studies, a pile of squeaky blank space. Fiberboard scraps lean on the opposite wall, MDF to stack and glue, a block to band saw, sand it down, nice and smooth. Blocks of wood are even better, grain to carve and hack, prime and paint, nail together and pry apart, construct a hut from crap pallets spied by the dumpster and they become a new and living thing. I’ve always got at least a small stack of panels, good for painting heavy textures, long planks in which I always vision landscapes or turned vertical become ancient Eastern compositions where you only get one sliver of a horizon but a little of everything from top to bottom. In the closet so many gallon gesso buckets now random mixing buckets, large amounts of color, also good for keeping old clay slip for an extended amount of time, shake it around every once in a while or it layers up and gets all bottom heavy. I put Sri Racha on everything and always keep the bottles, they make good solvent bottles with perfect flow and clear so you can see the color and consistency, I have about five lying around any given time. Little glass dishes or old cutting boards, even small plates make good painting palettes, especially if they have a small incline at the edges for no spill, white plates best to see true color.

I hoard tools to make stuff, hammer and screw drivers all sizes, putty and steak and palette knives, nails and screws for building and eyehooks to hang from the ceiling. I hoard all the brushes, never too many brushes; hard wire ones for cleaning, some strictly white paint and gesso brushes others acrylic and still others just oils. This summer I worked for housing and was given brushes, buckets, rollers, sponges, drop cloths – enough to run my own painting business, should I ever feel so inclined. I re-appropriate utensils, things like chop sticks, sporks, toothpicks, Q-tips, drum sticks (I don’t have drums [anymore]), folded unplayable Bicycle jokers, big rubber bands, blue and pink and orange, good old string, fishing wire, steel wire, glue and rubber cement, strange plastic disks with grey plastic grain and a peel-off wrapper, chipboard scraps from architecture 3D print-outs, old plaster molds and casts, canvas, plastic, rags (T-shirts), bags of bags of bags, more damn plastic, metal rods, dry crusted paint chips, bits of charcoal, many rulers, stale ink and rusted Exacto blades, rolls of paper, paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls for smaller jobs, paper clips, wax, graphite powder, old spray bottles and spray paint, all glowing.

It’s all in my room with this crippling potential to make stuff, raw matter of the trash heap age. There’s always something to be found, and it’s best when the find is unexpected, when you’re not looking for anything in particular. The best feeling is standing before a half finished painting, maybe a still life of the greenest plants in the world, and needing a specific something and not knowing what it is but what it has to do, and looking through loosely organized drawers boxes stacks in my closet, organized chaos is what I call it, and finding some potato masher or spatula picked up on the sidewalk and extracting it from the depths with force and purpose. The discovery is almost better than needing something and knowing what and where it is all at once, there’s no anticipation there, it’s too easy and I often keep looking for something better and by better I mean more surprising.