Paper Angel
What a playful creative project can teach us about the fullness of life
Friends,
The other day I decided to trace a copy of one of Paul Klee’s angels. I like the jagged simplicity of them, the way they feel like a child drew them thousands of years ago. They’re goofy lil’ guys, angels with loose hanging robes and lopsided wings that make them fly in circles. They’re not going to save a school bus hurtling over a bridge. But they might drift into a lifeless beige office, knock over the water cooler, and startle a few people to look up over their cubicle walls and make eye contact, maybe for the first time that day. They mean well, they make a miraculous mess.
So I traced one. I found an image online, printed it off a few times to get the scale right, and then taped up the image and paper to my window and traced away. Now he sits on my desk, reminding me to slow down and stay human.
It got me thinking (It got me thinking—a new motto for Still Life? Lol), why do this? Why go to the trouble to download the image and print it off and find paper and tape both papers to a window and then press a pencil into vintage paper? If the internet is Niagara Falls, why take the time to stand at the edge and scoop out a handful of pixels? What is the value of paper when screens and the lives we live through them seem so efficient and optimized and unlimited? Why trace an angel?
Let’s find our way to an answer through a short thought experiment. About 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. 500 hours per 1 minute! Can you wrap your head around that? I can’t, so let’s do some math: it takes 19 hours and 39 minutes to watch all eight Harry Potter movies, so that means you’d have to watch Harry stepping onto the Hogwarts Express all the way to turning Voldemort into that creepy wrinkly baby over 25 times in a row. Since, as muggles, we don’t have access to time-turners, we’d have to turn this into a part time job, which means watching the whole series every week for 25 weeks. So, again: to watch the amount of video content uploaded in one minute on YouTube, you’d have to graduate from Hogwarts over and over for half a year. And that’s just YouTube. In one minute, how many pictures are posted on Instagram? Videos on TikTok? Comments on Reddit? Harry, there has to be another way.
Now let’s go back to my paper angel. Imagine stacking up these 500 hours of YouTube videos on one side of a giant scale. See them spilling over the edge, a pile of pulsing pixels, the scale tipping to one side. Now drop the paper angel onto the other side. Watch it drift and loop down through the air as it settles onto the scale, and: then what? It pushes the scale all the way in the other direction. And it’ll do that every time.
In a world where we can layer bits and atoms so seamlessly on top of one another, it can often feel like they’re the same thing. But we know, deep down we know: they’re not. What I’m trying to say is that this hand-drawn angel has weight and heft to it, it exists in the world as itself, it has what the writer Walter Benjamin called “aura,” it’s “unique presence in space and time”—
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence.
Reproducing life will never reach the fullness of life itself, no matter how accurate or high-def the reproduction is. It will never have presence in time and space in the same way, the same depth. And so, a simple game of tracing an angel for no reason actually gives us some insight into just how full and deep and rich our embodied lives actually are:
Material. I got the sheet of paper from a vintage 1960s memo pad my mom sent me a few years ago. I come from a family of trinket-lovers and patina-seekers: old boxes, postcards from the past, scraps of paper. We love it. So this sheet of paper it’s just pulp from a tree lit by sunlight, it’s also embedded within a history of interests.
Process. Tracing the angel meant my hands followed Paul Klee’s hands from almost a century ago. There’s layers of history on there. And then because I didn’t have a lightbox, I got to do some creative problem solving with tape and our living room window and tape. It only took me a few minutes of joyous futzing to print off the image and explore paper, modern art, and the way sunlight pours into our apartment.
Memory. I could make a bot to scrape the internet and print off whatever angels were uploaded that day, but then I wouldn’t be involved. By tracing this one, I took something I love out of the Niagara-flow of internet content and onto my desk, I struggled with it, interacted with it. The whole process meant this tiny moment of art history became more memorable to me. I didn’t just glance over the surface of it, I explored it through eyes and hands and body and brought it into my own inner life. (“O, to take what we love inside, / to carry within us an orchard…”)
Presence. This one’s a little more slippery to talk about, but the drawing is utterly itself. You can download ten thousand images of Klee’s Angels, but you won’t have this particular one. It’s got a bit of aura, a bit of the handmade, traces of my own shaky hand, this particular tree-turned-paper, this particular graphite, this particular scent of history drifting into my living room. There’s something human about it, made through thousands of breaths—mine, and the artist’s.
So: make some art and un-meme your life. Why not? Anything you make will be utterly yours, and your process of making will have all sorts of unexpected play and pleasure along the way. Who knows, maybe by the end you’ll have your own angel on your shoulder. I can almost hear mine now starting to whisper some secret thing, if only I slow down to listen.
Take care,
Michael
“You Reading This, Be Ready” by William Stafford
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –
What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?Read a poem by America’s best young poets
I loved this animated short film on what makes us human
A critical review of the Vatican’s art exhibition in the Venice Biennale
Heat Death of the Internet - a brilliant description of how it feels right now
I loved this piece Michael! I’ll keep
and share it in my Cure-ations
I loved this so much, Michael. Thank you for sharing. My house is in disarray from a move currently, but once I have access to my printer again I think I’ll try this with my preschooler.