What Does that Cowboy Hat have to do with Papermaking?
I used to buy lottery tickets. OK, from time to time I still do. When I buy a ticket the winnings are immediately spent in my head.
I purchase an apartment in Paris and then I create a small set of self-sustaining businesses. Each business involves the production and use of linen: farming, weaving, and papermaking. I envision these as interlocking cooperatives, with maximum benefit to each member and the environment.
Anyway, that's how I spend my lottery winnings. But of course it never happens. I'd have to win the lottery.
I was hoping to win the Art-like-lottery, with my exhibition in Santa Fe. Obviously I scaled down my hopes and plans, eliminating French real estate and large communal projects. If I sold a piece from my exhibition, I'd buy a cowboy hat.
What little boy or girl born in the nineteen forties didn’t have or covet a cowboy hat? It may seem a bit late, but I wanted one. What better place to find a great hat but Santa Fe? Before the show opening I was custom-fitted for the cowboy hat of my dreams: a granite gray, 100% beaver, with a wide brim. My head was measured with a contraption known as a conformateur at O'Farrell's hat emporium. Cost of such a hat would be nine hundred dollars and would not be possible unless sales from the exhibition reached lottery-like proportions. I was back to a familiar situation: spending mental dollars.
Unfortunately, the gallery was way out in the middle of nowhere, far, far from the established galleries of Santa Fe. Unless interested collectors, with cash-in-hand, had a GPS-equipped vehicle there was no hope of finding the gallery and buying my work. The invitation had no map and a very unfamiliar address.
No visitors No art sales. No cowboy hat.
The Papermill Not Paid For With Lottery Winnings.
I decided to not wait any longer for a winning lottery ticket or successful exhibition sales to be the engine powering realization of my desires and dreams.
I have gone out on my own, purchased a much less expensive cowboy hat and signed a lease on a warehouse. I believe most people would call it crazy. I call it not wasting any more time.
Handmade paper is the sweet fruit of a very labor intensive endeavor.
I get that thrill when I make an amazing sheet of rag paper. That sensation drives me to share it. I am of the opinion that once someone experiences the hands-on value of making something they can take pride in, it changes their view of the world.
It changes their view further when they wear a cowboy hat while they are doing it.
Sandy Kinnee
November 6, 2008
p.s. I have no home in Paris. I’ll always have Paris anyway.