Praeterita

  I took this photo ten years, in February 2011. There are so many things about it that are so different from now that I feel I'm looking at something from someone else's life: The location is the living room of an old farmhouse that my wife and I owned back then, in a very small town in northwestern Illinois not far from the Mississippi River. The old fireplace, the old wood pocket doors, are all original, but I repainted the walls and put up a faux tin ceiling. The watercolour over the fireplace is something I did back in London in the 1990s. The ceramic vase was from a ceramic artist who had a small workshop and store on the little high street in this town. Finally, I took the photo on a Samsung flip-phone, so it was probably 160 Kb, as opposed to the multi-megabyte photos we all take with our smartphones now. I imagine this is true for all of us: the older we get, we can look back at more than one time in our lives with the amazement of people discovering the ancient Egypti...

I just created a new design for the public art/community memoir project for the Carroll County Historical Society in northwest Illinois. I'll be presenting this to the CCHS board on Tuesday morning: Images and text supplied by the community will be printed on plexiglass panels, which will be illuminated at night in the manner of a luminary. The building shown above is the HQ of the CCHS, in a nineteenth century Italianate house that is on the National Historic Register (I believe).

One of my projects for 2010 is a public art-community history project in a small town in northwest Illinois called Mount Carroll, where my wife Patty and I own a house that we use for weekend/summer getaways. The project is a collaboration between me and Patty, who is a writer. We just received news that the Carroll County Historical Society will be our not-for-profit sponsoring organization, which means we can now proceed to apply for state grants, etc. The art part of it will consist of large lightbox columns, with photos of people's faces and quotations from their writing workshop material printed on the sides. Here is a Photoshop photo of what the columns might look like at night: The shape might change, but the basic idea will look something like this. Keep checking in for further news on the project, including links to a forthcoming Facebook page.