Friday, August 26, 2011

A quick trip up the pike & Mail Art, of course.

 We drove up to Washington, D.C. yesterday to meet up with M, who'd been visiting friends in Maryland. The sky was lovely, the weather a bit on the humid side, and the Interstate wasn't jammed with traffic.
 I snapped this as we passed the Washington Monument. it looks curved but that's just because I snapped while moving, I guess. We couldn't see the crack, which must be on another side, but the monument was cordoned off so no one could get close to it.
 This is a wild mixture of architecture. Mainly Roman but with sphinx-like statues in front. It's one of the Freemason's buildings in the district.

 We were stopped at a traffic light on 16th street and realized that we were in front of the Mexican Embassy and then realized that there were lots of embassies on this street. I couldn't catch the names of the countries as we drove by them, however. Some were very elaborate buildings.
 This is the Jefferson monument. In the distance you can make out the tip of the Washington monument. I snapped this as we were leaving the district. I'd been reading about Jefferson and his home, Monticello, in the book I'm reading (and highly recommend) At Home by Bill Bryson. Also, read about how these monuments are like the Palladian buildings in Italy.
 This is the view of the Pentagon from I 95 as we were heading south. Those diagonals are lights by the interstate.  We get to see a lot of famous sites just driving home.  During our drive home, the weather changed, rain and horizontal lightening, and bad traffic at times. oooh scary lightening, but we made it home in 2 hours. Now, we await the arrival of Hurricane Irene.
 I made my mail art for Thursday before we left home. I used images that I found in a 1965 magazine. I love them and was excited to be able to use them. I wanted the focus on them so my composition had to be direct and simple.
 The colored paper background is from my source of old paper, a box of Craftint Colormatch, which I inherited
from my friend.
Before I mail these, I'm going to re-scan them in higher resolution. My family is wanting me to consider a book of my Tiny Town series, but I scanned in low resolution, oops my bad, so I'm now going to do too scans per piece.

What to do about the Tiny Town series? Ask recipients to scan them for me? Maybe.

2 comments:

phonelady said...

I love the sights you see on your drives that was just awesome . Well and now we sit and await Irene . I hope everyone comes out unscatched from her evil fury.

Beanie Mouse said...

Hope you escape any hurricane trouble...!

How did I get into this?

I was asked when I started doing Mailart. Good question. Like many artists, I was making and mailing art without even knowing it had a name ...