A long time ago, perhaps on my first wedding anniversary, which we spent in Bowral, I bought Glamour’s Beauty Book. It was full of advice that seemed dubious and at best ridiculous. Things we have since seen dramatised in Mad Men and in The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Put your make up on after your husband goes to bed, take it off before he wakes up, freshen it up before he returns from work, that kind of thing. The book is copyrighted every year from 1957 to 1966, so it’s a full decade of outdated ideas.
They have a section called Sources of Vitality, and they cite Love as one of the unusual sources. I wanted to put in some kind of meta commentary, which i did with quotes about love and dubious advice. who knows it worked, the reader will determine. My mother, born in the 1940s and an adolescent therefore at this time will probably see no irony, my friend Sophie looked at it yesterday and she “got” it. So as always the book is an interaction between the book and its reader/viewer.
I don’t like be shouted at or moralised to, so being ambiguous suits my work I think!
This continues the envelope series. Avril gave me a box of paper samples which i took great delight in sorting into colours / hues. for this book I took anything over 150gsm within the colours that worked for the envelopes I was recycling. At some point I will run out of envelopes, and I do quite like how this all is panning.
