This press is both a thing of beauty, and a reproach. As a thing of beauty ... I bought it some nine years ago from a woman who used to have a stall at Jackalope, and also sold things out of her home on occasion, way over on the west side of town - artifacts, for the most part, that she brought back from Mexico. I have an unframed, and slightly amateurish, but lovely azure blue oil painting of a Mexican city square from her, and a bowl or two, and this - for which I think I paid $100, together with the painting, and had to scrape the money together at that time, but I was so glad that I did. There's an identical object offered for nearly three times as much - and no oil painting included - in - yes! - the current Restoration Hardware catalog, in the artisanal objects section ...
But it's also a reproach, as I said. Every summer I am full of intent to be more artistically productive, to draw, to print make (and this is where the press can come in handy) - and what's happened to date? I've drawn Moth from several angles, done (at other people's behest) a couple of drawings in the more obliquely intellectual moments of our British Poetry class, doodled my way across a couple of pages, and that's about it. And I'm behind hand in correspondence, badly, and I have a little shelf of books I really, really want to read that are whining at me for attention ... This, in other words, is the panicked state of mind of someone who realizes that it's a lot closer to next semester, already, than I want or need it to be ...
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