Monday, October 4, 2010

Steps to Paris

In 1985 Christopher was asked to contribute if possible a modern design for an exhibition in Paris to be shown in December 1985. As many marblers achieve a pattern by continuous steps arriving at the desired pattern it never occured to me to show how Chris arrived at his final paper he named Paris for the exhibition until I explained it to Vi Wilson, a marbler from Australia who was visiting me and who said it was very interesting to see how he arrived at the final design. I decided to show the 4 papers (approx.size 19"x 25")that let up to the one he decided is the one.

So here is the first attempt above. I do not recall over how many weeks or month his attempts took at arriving what he hoped to achieve. Here another step above.I remember at this point he started to like what he had created but felt it wasn't modern enough.This lovely pattern was shown on the cover for the Second International Marblers'Gathering Exhibition in San Francisco, 1992. If I remember correctly he nearly felt he had it with the one above but the background was too busy so he marbled on to arrive finally at Paris below. Exhibited in Les Arts Du Livre d'Hier a Demain (Atelier d'Arts Appliques du Vesinet) Honorary degree for "Paris" paper. Exhibiton shown at the Museum of Luxembourg, Paris. In March of 2011 when Vi Wilson returned for 6 days to help me categorize Christopher's work for a collection and detailing works we noticed there were many attemptet steps to arrive at the final design and as we talked about how he went about it she wrote: "These papers were not created by successive over-marbling, but the different elements ( leaves, flowers etc.) were progressively added to the previous layer/s of color/pattern on the size. The completed pattern was then transferred to a sheet of paper". Vi Wilson