The Story: Vermilion Tea

Vermilion Tea BOX PRINT reproduction & paper print available

A few years ago, I was helping a friend do some demolition work and we were tearing down a few walls in an abandoned house here in Chicago. Inside one of the walls, we found a handful of beautiful old newspapers from 1950-something I believe. One of the papers was called the Daily Colonist and it covered the region of Victoria BC.

Earlier in my career, I worked as an interpretive naturalist for the forest service. Part of my job was to identify various birds and animals and to help the campers and hikers to identify those in the region. After leaving that job, I still kept that knack for identifying these birds and animals wherever I went. I’m not sure if I told you this part but the bird on this particular piece was actually an inspiration from another abandoned building where I got the wood lathe that I used on the frame. He was living in one of the rooms at the time (and I think it was an abandoned church building) and when he flew away I thought about the migration of birds and how they are truly daily colonists themselves, going from place to place for short periods of time. While I was in that place, I also found a bunch of old hymnals on the floor and one of them was open to page 28. The song was “This Life is Hard to Understand” and, as with many Baptist hymns, it talked of being saved and all that good stuff but I thought the title was very interesting, since many other titles were things like “God Lift us up” and “The Savior is Ready.” I saved the pages of these old books and used them to create a collage in the background. While traveling in North Carolina, in the middle part of the state, I stopped at an abandoned farm house to look around and found an old magazine in the living room. It had an article in it about how to create patterns on leather with a tooling device. In the article there was a photo of a gal wearing a handbag, so I blew up the image of the handbag and used that pattern in the background of this piece, sort of like wallpaper.

In my life I’ve created hundreds of pieces and each one has been inspired by a place I’ve been to or something I’ve seen. I’ve explored over 100 abandoned houses, some in Virginia, some in North Carolina, and some in Illinois. The rest have been here and there. In each house, when I take some little relic or piece of ephemera, I also leave behind a tiny work of art or a poem I’ve written, sort of as a trade-off. I like to think I’m giving the house or building a little something for what it’s giving me.