Random Acts of Art, Part Two: Mail Art

What bliss it brings to open the mailbox and find, in amongst the bills and junk mail, some bold, wacky, colorful piece of handmade art!

Above: Mail art card for BReN

Snail mail collages and artful parcels hold a special place in my heart. I find the experience of making them just as magical as the receiving…Something unusual seems to flow forth when I acknowledge from the beginning that the art I'm making does not belong to me, that it will launch off into the world and have a life of its own.

Above: Bren's art mail parcel

One thing I love about mail art is that it gets to pass through many hands. Who knows whether it may brighten a postal worker's day or bring a grin to some clerk's face on the way to its final destination?

The mysterious work of mail art is a good metaphor for our creative work in general, in this sense: Part of the joy of making art is that we never know who it will touch or what its exact purpose in the world is. We have to go on making it out of trust, and sheer love, acknowledging that it's not our business to know where it will end up or whether it will "do" anything. Bringing it into being is enough. The rest is out of our hands!

Above: Mail art post card for Monika

Pushing the Envelope: Fun Mail Art Forays
There are numberless fun ways to make mail art. I once had a snail mail exchange with my friend, Farnoosh, which was based around sending a small stuffed, ferret-like animal (whom we named Stanley) back and forth through the mail. Each time Stanley arrived, he would be decked out with a different costume or possess some interesting new accoutrement. Sometimes, we would simply send photographs of Stanley back and forth. One winter, when Stanley was visiting Farnoosh in New York, I received a batch of snapshots of him sitting forlornly on a snow heap and sipping cocktails in a dark bar.

Another fun snail mail exploration is round-robin mail art. One year, my mom, my cousin Kristin and I decided to try round-robin collage-making, in which each person started a piece, rolled it up, stuck it in a tube mailer, and then sent it on to the next person for further embellishment. Round-robin pieces offer a great way to experiment, see with new eyes, and let go of the focus on product, because there's no way of knowing how it will turn out!

Above: Round-robin collage by my cousin, Kristin, my mom and me

Making Mail Art
Here's my current favorite way to make mail art:

1) Start with a big piece of cardboard (gessoed, if you like).

2) Grab some oil pastels, crayons or a ball point pen and scribble to your heart's content, like a rapt kindergartner. Experiment with loopy lines, squiggles, words, shapes… Just see where your hand takes you!

3) Next, slather on some watered-down layers of paint over the scribbles. Go wild with color and enjoy how the pastels or crayons resist the paint, making interesting layers.

Above: Me and Amita hair-dry our enormous mail art collage (and each other)

4) Use a hairdryer to dry the sheet of cardboard, and then cut it up into rectangular pieces. If you plan to send the pieces through the mail as postcards, you may want to cut them no bigger than 4.25 X 6", the maximum size for domestic postcard rates. (If you're using heavy cardboard, the post office will often charge you extra postage. If you use card stock or light, bendable cardboard, however, it's super cheap.)

5) Add collage layers, glitter, words or whatever fun embellishments you like, and then seal over your work with some clear packaging tape or a glossy varnish. Stamp, address, check with your post office to make sure you've included correct postage and send your art out into the world!

Above: Amita and my mom add collage layers

You can try the above process alone, or with some collaboration buddies. Have fun spreading the mail art love!

Above: Amita, my mom and me pose with our collaborative art piece

Random Acts of Art, Part One: First Fish

Every now and then, I like to put aside any creative projects or plans I may have, and simply commit random acts of art. "Random art," to me, is art with no gain in sight, except the sheer delight of making it. Committing random acts of art is like resetting my inner art compass…suddenly again I am pointed in the direction of pure fun, able to follow my gut and forget about whether something looks good, what purpose it serves, or whether anyone will like it.

The Magic of First Fish
I first got turned on to the joy of random acts of art by friend and fellow art-maker, Donna Otter. Many years ago, Donna began an annual artist's gathering called "First Fish." First Fish was loosely based on the tithing tradition, in which the first salmon caught during the spring season was thrown back into the waters as an acknowledgment of nature's bounty and as a blessing for an abundant season.

Above: Invitation to the East Coast Version of First Fish

Catch and Release Art-Making
At Donna's First Fish gatherings, a group of artists would make crazy collaborative art pieces, and then "throw them back" into the universe in some ceremonious and fun fashion…Sometimes the group would decide to burn them, or hang them in a tree, drop them off a pier, or mail them out at random, anonymously. One year, the group decided to put all the art together in a big box and mail it to the first "Fish" name in the phone book. Shortly thereafter, a certain Mr. and Ms. Fish received a mysterious box of messy, colorful art with no return address.

Random Art Goes on Retreat
A few years back, while working at Insight Meditation Society, a meditation retreat center in rural Massachusetts, I decided to hold an East Coast version of First Fish. I was living in a renovated grain silo at the time, and a group of us squeezed into the top floor and stayed up into the wee hours painting and collaging on big pieces of cardboard.

Above: My silo abode in Petersham, MA, and First Fish participants

Late that night, after finishing our work, some members of the group dropped off wild art surprises into the mail boxes of the sleepy New England town where we lived. The next day, others deposited colorful art into secret spots around the meditation center, where it would be noticed only by the keen-eyed retreatants that roamed the grounds.

Last I checked, before leaving the retreat center to come out West, there was still a bright piece of art stashed away on the back door of the retreatants' medicine cabinet…Success!

Above: Pile of First Fish art

Casting Back our Catch
It's easy as artists to get attached to our creations. Making random art and throwing it back into the world is a way of acknowledging that it doesn't really belong to us…If we can see, instead, that creativity arises out of a much larger source, and that that source is inexhaustible, then our art can flow freely out of us, and into the world, with less clinging and constriction.

On Creative Cohorts and Collaborative Magic

Finding a community of co-creators can bring expansiveness into our lives and art, opening us up to new directions and keeping us from becoming too limited by our own ideas of how things should look or be.

Collaboration frees us up to be more playful in the creative process, to break our own rules and see with new eyes. It's easier to shirk the sticky tentacles of the ego when you have someone else on board to help you laugh at life and not take yourself too seriously.

Part of the reason I'm starting this blog is to connect with others who are also on the creative path. My hope is that through sharing our experiences and insights, we can spark new ideas, spur each other on and enjoy a deeper sense of connection through community.

So, by means of introduction, I'd like to share with you a bit about my life in art, and some of the friends and co-conspirators who've inspired me along the way.

First Taste of Artistic Community
The summer of my 17th year I attended the California State Summer School for the Arts as a student of creative writing. I arrived there a slightly geeky, journal-clutching girl from suburban San Diego. A matter of hours after stepping foot outside my parents' mini van and waving goodbye, my mind was totally blown open.

There were young artists from all disciplines there—theater, pottery, painting, music, animation, dance, writing. There were dudes with blue hair wearing fishnet stockings and beautiful sculptor chicks and lanky actor-types and gothic kids with violins. I thought I had stumbled into utopia.

The best part of that summer was that we were encouraged to collaborate. And that's where the real juice was for me. I posed for painters, wrote scripts for actors, drank tequila in the bushes with animators and held impromptu poetry readings set to violin music. We made food sculptures with left-over cafeteria inedibles and read and listened and learned from each other at work.

The experience of that summer planted a seed inside me, and I recognized myself as someone who wanted to live and breathe and share creativity, to manifest in the world what I saw and felt inside, to defy the ready-made reality that was being sold all around me.

Encouraged by the sense of community, I felt ready to live my life differently, to make it my own.

Pranks and Play in Academia
The next year I enrolled in school at UCLA. Planting myself down in the structured world of academia was by no means easy. Though I loved my course of study, English literature and creative writing, my spirit was at odds with the climate of critical thought around art. The study of writing and literature often felt sober and calculated as opposed to the heart-opening experience of creation that I'd had so many times on my own.

I like to think that I survived my academic experience with the help of a few indispensable friends and cohorts. We found ways to sabotage the staid university milieu by becoming prankster poets and fools. We were always coming up with plans and schemes to disturb the peace.

Once, my friends Amaranth and Farnoosh and I sneaked into our poetry professor's office and planted a copy of a lurid Fabio romance novel in his book shelf, amongst the weighty tomes of modernist poets and contemporary critics. The book had a particularly unseemly cover, with an image of Fabio, his white shirt opened to expose his rippling, tanned chest, and his lion's mane of hair flowing in the wind.

Keen-eyed and percipient as he was, it did not take long before our professor discovered the offensive paperback planted on his shelf, put two and two together, and called us into his office. Peering over his spectacles, with a smirk on his face, he asked whether we'd like back the "bodice ripper" novel we'd so kindly lent him.

Outside of the lecture halls and long hours of study, life became our palette for creative play. Whether it was filming pseudo-operas in shopping markets with my friend Kat, sabotaging poetry critiques by planting squeaking stuffed animals under the classroom table, or dressing up in tutus and cowboy hats to go to the airport, we found ways to bring art into our lives and make the journey of formal academic life a little less cumbersome.

A Call to Engage
There are, of course, many more tales to tell, and many other artists and creative comrades who've touched my life. But I'll save those stories for some day down the road.

Until next time, I'd like to invite you to write to me, if you feel so inspired. I'd love to hear what's got you fired up, what project you've got cooking, or what demons you're tangling with. It's not always easy to navigate the uncharted, and often rocky, terrain of a creative life. My hope is that we can trade tips, share our foolish foot-slips, and help cheer each other on along the way.