Sometimes a piece of art takes many forms before it becomes something that I really like, and this is one of those pieces. In 1999, it originally started out as a painting called "The Fool" which was so embarrassing I won't post it here. After coming to my senses in 2008, I decided to repurpose it, and so I started a new piece over top of it.
The new collage was based on this photo I took of a balloon flower, and I was assembling it as a purely collage piece, with the background coming from advertising circulars, the color triangles coming from hardware store paint swatches, and some illustrations from an old children's encyclopedia (In the lower left you can see the reason it was called Tour de France). After a few painstaking weeks of cutting and collaging these little triangles onto it, eventually I decided that it just wasn't working out. It sat around for a few years, and periodically I would work on it a little, trying different things: painting over it, pouring India ink onto it, removing the India ink, sanding it down, painting over that. Finally I ended up with the piece you see in the last stages, but I was still pretty unhappy with it.
Finally, I had an idea... it wasn't working as a large piece, but it would be pretty interesting cut up into postcards. It was also a chance to finally answer some of my mail which had been accumulating for some 6 years since I stopped actively participating in mail art. It would be perfect.
