Photocopied Drinkware

When I was in my 20’s I did a lot of hand tinting of photos. Then I started going to the library and photocopying images from books and most frequently working on them with pastels and colored pencils and ink. The photos were always old black and white ones of things like the Lion Gate at Mycenae and pyramids and old sculptures and chickens and old trees and simple tables. I loved working with these photocopies, which were sometimes as poor in quality as the photoshopped glasses above; it was like working with ghostly artifacts.

Later (still in my 20s) I did a series of photocopied Japanese photos from the Meiji era. This was when I was reading nothing but Japanese novels and trying to learn Japanese…and I managed to learn enough eventually that I was able to sort out a good bit of the dialogue in Japanese movies. The photos were beautiful (I forget the name of the photographer) and these I reworked with thick bold pastel treatments. They came out quite well. But whatever happened to them I haven’t a clue. As with the Lion Gates and pyramids and chickens and old trees and simple tables, they didn’t survive. They may have been destroyed when a tree fell onto the house we were renting and destroyed the roof over the room that I used as a studio, crashing through the ceiling. There were several disasters there that ruined hundreds of drawings and inks. The tree was one of the worst as it brought with it a lot of water damage.

This post isn’t to rue the destruction of those images. Instead, it’s just to remark on how much I still like photocopies.

P.S. They’re not “glasses” as they’re plastic, but they’re not properly tumblers as their bottoms aren’t curved. I don’t know why the English language hasn’t come up with a suitable word for plastic drinkware.