On Patina, Agedness, & the Effects of TIME

On Patina, Agedness, & the Effects of TIME

       Patina n, 3 : a surface appearance (as a coloring or mellowing) of something grown beautiful esp. with age or use 4 : a finish or coloration derived from association, habit, or established character : the look acquired from long custom or settled use.

"When you see an aging building or a rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together. When you paint over a building, there is no more magic to that building. But if it is allowed to age, then man has built it and nature has added into it." 

-David Lynch

I am not sure exactly why I am so taken with patinas. It is as though the hypnotize me. Anything sporting (spotting?) rust, lichen or any variant of weathering or wear, such as the spot right beneath an old cars door handle where the drivers hand brushing against the little recess in the door panel has worn away the original paint to a expose a little patch of bare steel. Or such as old mopeds, or the blanching of old plastic to a opaque, brittle shell by the sun's ultraviolet rays.

My 1956 JC Higgins Colorflow

I find these so fascinating, and I am compulsively drawn to inspect and observe such discoveries like a biologist studying an endangered species. I think it may have something to do with the human wear being proof of life, proof human interaction- proof of the personal on the permanent - a symbiosis. Here is an object fashioned by people made use of long enough to seem organic or to redefine itself. In terms of used and re-used items, it is that others have aquired and made use of it too, utilized it, for a time.

The cargo area of my 1959 VW SO23 Westy, at Gold King Mine

In 2006 I spent three days in Jerome, Arizona and visited what is likely the most patina-rich place I've ever seen. I drove there in my beatup skyblue, badly rusting 1959 VW Westfalia SO23 camper from Pheonix as a part of a caravan of about 100 other vintage aircooled VW buses. Besides a spectactle that literally stopped traffic and had the other vehicles on the road pulling over and whipping out cameras to snap pictures, and people waving and beaming smiles. I have tons of awesome photos from this trip on my Flickr page HERE.

In Jerome we converged at the old Gold King Mine whose sun blasted acres were home to a vast collection of random vehicles large and small, all at varying stages of agedness. Many were restored to running condition by a talented mechanic, the sole employee of the "mine." The place was a treasure-trove of patina, and I went wild with my camera.

The thought that we ourselves like a timeless boulder or disintegrating barn, or other forgotten shipwrecks endlessly rooting deeper into a host of lost beaches, and yet we are also ebbing and flowing along with these lush tapestries of things, becoming something different with each moment.

So it is this: the symbius of life's progression into decay, into another form, being right there, in every back alley, scattered across every city shadow, just waiting to be meditated upon and celebrated.