You Never Know

In my mind's ear I can hear perfectly the clop-clop of a horse pulling an open cart down Chepstow Place in London where I lived in 1968, adding its hoofbeat to the one-line chant voiced by the man running the operation: RAAAAGs'n'bones, RAAAAGs'n'bones.

A rag-and-bone man collects unwanted household items and sells them to merchants. In 19th century London about a thousand of these men lived in extreme poverty, surviving on the proceeds of what they collected each day. By the 1980's they were mostly gone.

I'm somewhat of an updated knockoff rag-and-bone person myself, of the sort portrayed aptly by Florian Roderi in A Weekend with Picasso:

We artists are a bit like ragpickers;
we like to have all sorts
of odds and ends around us.
They may seem completely useless
to other people
but
       you never know!

I experience such pleasure today as I decide which of the odds and ends around me to make into a greeting card, pressing into service a 'mostly monochrome' exercise done for a Jane Davies class—an exercise which itself pulled from several odds and ends—along with a promotional postcard salvaged from the mail. Scissors, acrylic matte medium, books and bricks to press pieces together, and finally a crystal clear plastic sleeve.

You never know!

Buzzing Bees, Like a Haze in Spring
4.25 x 5.5" greeting card; acrylic, India ink, and collage
abstract
2018