Double Acts

[xx Jones]

Its been a while since I managed to blog my incoming mail, but this is a start. I thought I take a different approach and feature several pieces of mail art, with some common theme. So here we go.

Over this summer I received several pieces of mail, which pair up very nicely. 

Firstly there is this pair of tape collages from Jon Foster. I love the colour composition, mostly orange, black and white, and the use of text and the juxtaposition of blocks of colour and illustration elements. A fish in a tree! "Fire Fire! A house is burning." This may be from a children's book.

The reverse sides match up too, surprisingly the map is not from somewhere in the US but from Central London and East London - Liverpool Street, Brick Lane, Hackney Road.

The next pair is from Erni Bär. Two collages on sturdy cardboard, in typical Erni style. Cheerful bright primary and secondary colours, yellow, blue and red, balanced with some orange and brown. Also here we have a composition of colour blocks and some illustration, a bit of nature, and funny animals, two chicken and two funny cats, a lovely menagerie complemented with bold text.  And, not to forget, a chocolate revelation. Enthüllt! Mmmm! Eat Art! Pudding the two together I cannot help making a connection - did the cats scare the chickens into flight? Also here the reverse sides match in style, and we find the haptic werewolf howling, and some rude joke, which I will definitely not translate. Erniness rocks on+on!

Lastly, two companion pieces from Diane Keys. These must be pages from a medical textbook, with diagrams of muscles and other tissue, lovingly altered with watercolour, black and gold marker and a bit of fabric to add dimension. Very nice.

Now, I don't know if these pairs can be called dyptichs, or whether the pairing was intentional or not. In all instances the cards arrived a week or more apart. While receiving one of the cards is nice, the second one adds a whole new dimension! You start looking at the first card in a new light. You discover symmetries and differences, which makes for a pleasant aesthetic experience. Mail art is visual, textual, but there is also a dimension of time - the time the mail takes to travel from person to person, in this case a narrative stretching over a week or several weeks. When the second card arrives it is a lovely surprise.

Apologies for my ramblings, but isn't mail art just wonderful?

[xx Jones]

Ah, thanks for your comments. There is still a lot more to post ... and new mail to send, of course. 

[DKeys]

thanks for blogging XX--glad you like them. They are both from the same "batch"