Picture holders 2

Stumbling on the notion that the face of the stair tread could be covered in printed material instead of leaving the natural wood exposed was an interesting twist. I started sorting through the collection of vintage print material I've stockpiled. I came across an atlas of the United States compiled by National Geographic and copyrighted, 1960. Towards the back were a couple of pages of wonderful maps of our National Parks. The maps have a beautiful lemon yellow color to them. (I've been drawn to this shade of yellow a lot lately. I bought two shirts in this same hue last weekend. I think it's a classic June color and it probably reflects my ache for more sunlight. We've had 20 consecutive days of rain in Portland - very wet, even for the Pacific Northwest.)

Using maps from Grand Teton and Yellowstone as the base, I started building the collage in a little more intentional/less random way than usual. On the Teton frame, I found the words "adventurer" and "such" from my old dictionary and stuck a little string of music between them. Using "adventurer" is an obvious choice for this amazing landscape, but the phrase "Of a quality that has been or is to be specified" in the definition of "such" really struck me as a personal note, a piece of one's own interpretation, on their experience in Grand Teton. As a bow to randomness, I slipped in the music and a small vintage postage stamp on the larger bottom rail. On the Yellowstone frame, I went with an intentional international flair. Yellowstone National Park is arguably the most well-known national park in America, second only to Yosemite perhaps. I've layered a series of colorful international stamps on the righthand side of the map and dropped the word "find" on the lower rail. I'm hesitating on gluing this one together for some reason and I think it's the lack of randomness in the layout. When this gut instinct kicks in, I tend to trust it and leave the piece on my drawing board for a day or two... until the mood or muse finds me.