Until I started taking an interest in free art material just waiting to be picked up out of the gutter, I never realized how many rusty washers there are in the world. I love that patina so much that I looked up how to achieve a fake rusty appearance, using this rather frighteningly toxic brew that should only be mixed outdoors in a mask. It works, but nothing beats a piece of metal that's been lying in the gutter.
Metal washers remind me of all sorts of things: miniature millstones, jade buttons, money from the Island of Yap, wombs, universes. (I teach symbolic analysis, remember!) What's fun is to see how many doll parts you can make out of rusty washers.
Tomorrow my friend Kate-across-the street and I are going downtown to look for rusty washers, and if we can't find any we'll try to find rusty flattened bottle caps. They can work just as well. Sometimes. A lot of potential and mystery lies in what's missing--the hole. We'll see how many we can find and what sort of poppet parts we can use them for. Perhaps Kate-across-the-street can show me how to transfer pictures of what we make to this blog.
Forgive me for waxing philosophical, but you might say that a rusty washer that's lain in the gutter has the same honest patina as someone who's refrained from having "work" done on their face and let nature do it's darnedest. I have not had work done on my face, but then I haven't lain in the gutter long enough to start worrying.
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