Fragments

 If I want to trace the prehistory of “fragments” they are probably older than the little white notebook that I talked about in the recent “Through Screens” post. Well, I suppose the history could lead back to Snowhill Church in Springfield, Ohio. Google tells me that the church started life as Snowhill United Church of Christ, and after a variety of ecumenical mergers, closed its doors on November 17, 2017 after 133 years of services. That was a couple of days after I celebrated my 69th birthday, but I must admit that oh, maybe 7 or 8 decades have passed since Snowhill had been the Olduvai Gorge of my “Fragments.”

Over the years my folks dutifully hauled us off to church services at Snowhill, encouraging us, no doubt, to at least consider some relatively traditional type of theology. I will not speak for either of my siblings, both of whom eventually ended up “Churched” as one might say in the South. But that is not what I took away from Snowhill. Instead I remember the programs. Those, at the time, mimeographed and folded papers that told you what the readings, psalms, etc., would be used for the service.  And the pencils.

OK, now hang with me here for a minute, probably because my memory gets a bit hazy. The Wall archeologists disagree on the specifics here. One school remembers folding chairs in the sanctuary during this era. However, another group holds out for more traditional pews. Neither mentions anything about angels dancing on the head of a pin, nor takes a firm position on the question of the possibility of an extended family for Jesus, wives, heirs, movie producers, etc.

Yet the schism is important for this discussion as both schools of thought specifically agree on the presence of those little yellow golf pencils that one was supposed to use to write on the little yellow envelopes into which one placed your offering - name, amount - whatever adults wrote on the envelopes. I never knew. The traditional pew school advocates the traditional notion that the envelopes and pencils were stuck to the back of the wooden pews.  The folding chair school chooses to ignore the origins of either the pencils or the envelopes, asserting that such a choice was in god’s hands. Hmm, yellow pencils, yellow offering envelopes. Could be something there, but we’ll have to come back to it.

The point is that, driven by the sin of theological boredom, I used the pencils to trace lines between the words in the programs, creating designs. Get it? Small designs within the larger design of the whole page? Smaller designs within the whole? Fragments!! OK. A bit of a stretch, but entire disciplines spring from such reasoning: Archeology, Theology, Design, Art History.

Now, in the name of full disclosure, I must admit that I am doubtful that any of the text above can trace a direct line from my agnostic childhood reveries and scribbles to the images I have chosen to call “Fragments.” But I set myself the task of tracing the ancient evolution of these contemporary images, and that was the best I could do.

A far more likely inspiration is the time it takes to do any of the contemporary images. Yes, we are talking hours and hours across days. And here there may well be a connection to the ancient Snowhill images - the mind does wander: Is this really the pattern I want to use here? Colors! So many colors. Why did I pick up that marker? What other colors might work better together? Especially if I chose a different design for this part of the image! I could do that. I could make a separate smaller version of that particular part of the big image with different designs and colors.  But, artistically speaking, how could I make it clear to someone else what I was doing? Ah, frame them together!

And so:

Fragment #1