Shifting Material/ities: A Composer's Choices
From 1997-1999, Aunt Carol used greeting cards that opened on a fold and had borders, which served as frames for her paintings. In this card from 1999, the border is a metallic silver. For other cards around that timeframe, she also used versions that had gold borders with varying textures, from simple lines to textured frames. These frames made the cards look almost like windows onto landscapes, providing tiny peeks into a different places. I remember talking to Aunt Carol about these bordered cards, and as she became more prolific with her watercolor greeting cards, the greater the expense became in purchasing the cards.
Starting in 2000, partially to cut back on her costs, she only used greeting cards without borders, which allowed her to paint all the way to the edges of the paper. Early on, she exclusively used cards that folded, creating an inside for her handwritten message and an outside/front for the watercolor painting; by the end of the series, she exclusively used postcard-style greeting cards that sported her watercolors on the front and often shorter messages on the back. In the years between, she fluctuated between the two styles of cards. Her sense of the different types of cards and formats subtley changed her painting and her writing, especially since the postcard-style cards limited her space for a written message. The simpler style of the cards was also indicative of the ways she was streamlining her life, eliminating extra costs and materials as she assessed her needs and finances late in life.
She occasionally would use a rubber stamp to embelish her handwritten messages on the cards. In the first few cards, she used a "Happy Birthday" stamp and then added a personalized message, written in pen, around the stamped phrase. Then, beginning in 2004, she started using a stamp of her name that she would emboss on the back of the postcard-style cards. This stamping practice added a sense of authorship and, in terms of materiality, a new sense of texture to the cards.