About our New Logo

I climbed through the broken pane and entered into the dust filled chamber of a Victorian living room...one that had been sitting abandoned for fifty years. Abandoned farm houses like this were common in the Virginia landscape where I grew up. Exploring their interiors was a pastime for most high school kids like myself but while the mission of others was one of escaping their parents, mine was creative in nature:  I was here for the papers, man. Everything in the room wore the same dust blanket and as I explored I began to fill my backpack with discarded paper items: on old calendar, the silverfish-eaten remnants of an old ticket stub, a coverless magazine, a children’s geography book. Strewn about the floor were the materials I would use to create some of my first collage pieces. After the night of collecting I returned to my basement studio and with a glass of sweet tea and a headlamp. I rifled through my finds, coming to a large pile of letters at the bottom of my bag. I didn’t remember picking these up earlier in the evening but somehow they made their way into my bag…and they were absolutely beautiful.  The date on the back read 1878, and each letter was a correspondence between lovers who resided across the state from one another. The script of the writing was romantic and genteel, belieing the subject of the letters which ranged from the death of the family pig to a discussion of winter solitude. There was a richness to the letters as well, which were created in a post war era where nothing was erased but merely written and rewritten until it was right.

When I thought about the redesign of our new logo, I wanted to give a nod to these lost letters, and be inspired by their raw beauty and the honestly of something created by hand.