If you are thinking it must have been a lot of fun taking the vintage wallpaper book apart, you are one hundred percent correct.

Long before the 1940s wallpaper catalog came into my life, another artist had torn pages of green stripes and calico tulips away from the half-inch long binding staples, leaving stacks of cup shaped scraps clinging to the edge of the book.  Naturally, I wonder what those missing samples looked like.  They were probably the prettiest ones.  What I wouldn’t give know how she used those squares of thick, ink coated paper?  Did her children take them to school to make Valentines or birthday cards?  Did she cover a notebook or line the walls of a doll house?  Or maybe she carried them in her purse as she shopped for perfectly matching carpets and paint, and then, when her decorating was done, laid them on the basement shelf with the leftover cans of paint, and forgot about them?   That’s what I would do.

I started taking the catalog apart as a distraction from making a photograph.  As usual, I was scared, hiding.  If I had known they held a picture, I probably never would have started picking the last little shreds away from the staples.  Isn’t that strange?  Maybe I’m more afraid of finding the picture I want, than not finding one at all, so I mislead myself into thinking I don’t want to make one.  Now that sounds like something I would do.