Every season, I create a physical piece of mail art that I send out to my “Art Lovers” subscribers to The Pink Teacup. For the fall of 2026, I created and matted individual cyanotype prints from a rubbings of early colonial gravestone carvings gravestone I did many years ago in the Northeast.
The cyanotype photographic process was invented in 1842. To create an image, you coat a surface with iron salts, lay a negative or physical object on top of it, and then expose it to UV light.
The areas exposed to light turn blue, while the areas covered by objects remain white. I mixed and coated each sheet of heavy paper with the light sensitive emulsion, laid my images down, and individually exposed each print in the sun.
I’ve collected and worked with these gravestone rubbings on and off for most of my adult life--always cutting, resizing, rearranging and reinterpretingthem in various ways and with a wide array of materials.
I love their bold, graphic expressiveness. I also love how the image of the rubbing has its own unique qualities that are often quite different from the original carving—creating and communicating a different mood or feeling from the original.
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