Finding Art              (Excerpt from 'A Thousand Beautiful Things')

The found object is also the finding one. It's just the science of time meets person meets location. It's the little thrill of finding the most perfect cashmere coat in a thrift shop. When you set out for the day you did not know that's exactly what you wanted. Something about the cut of cloth, the texture, called out to you, struck a chord. Even before trying it on you know the fit will be fine.

Many sculptors who work in metals keep large scrap piles in their yard. They never know when the light might shine just right on a particular piece. Assemblage artists and those who do installations often scour streets, alleys, shores, the sides of roads, their eyes, their fingers like gieger counters. Collage artists stockpile paper scraps. Seamstresses and tailors hoard fabric as knitters do yarn. I can still vividly recall at least two different women patients coming to the HIV unit I worked on, looking for crayons, markers, coloring books, poster board. One often said to me that she should not leave home without bringing along her art.

What's so magical about interior design is even if you can't afford to move, if you rearrange the furniture, change the color of couch covers or curtains, suddenly the urge to get going might abate for awhile.

Once I read of a family who was so poor that all they could afford was cardboard furnishings. Yet they got some shellac; they varnished, they polished, and the tones of beige shone honey gold.

In my hallway, set along the stair banisters, is a long rectangular table top, hand-made I assume. Perhaps it was someone's school project. Perhaps it was a hobby that's gone out of fashion. Whatever the case, by the time I found it, waiting for the dump truck, someone must have felts its usefulness had been outlived. Still, they were thoughtful enough to bag up its table legs and tape them to the back. I tried at first to screw them in place, but as a carpenter's apprentice soon gave up.

It was its inlaid tiles, framed by a dark oak, which caught my attention right from the get go anyhow. There are four tiles to be exact, perfect foot and a half squares of smoky ochre. Each is cut into a design which fits with its neighbor jigsaw-precise. All are very geometrical: octagons within circles within triangles within ellipses. Sometimes the whole thing looks art deco to me, and at other moments, Byzantine.

Like the fragment of a temple it continues to find some part in me which I did not know I'd ever lost.

© Stephen Mead 07