LUCIE LAMBERT
Illuminations

Art reproductions on postcards caught my eye as I left the great museums I visited on my travels. Over the years, I must have recognized the value of all that iconography as my imaginary collection of artworks drawn from every era and culture, every technique and style in human history, from the Lascaux cave paintings to my own contemporaries.

The idea of bringing these postcards together in a book came to me from Robert R. Reid, who gathered from his own archives the material for several volumes, published under the title Printing: A Life Long Addiction. Bob encouraged me to give a second life to this disorganized mass of visual material that lay sleeping in a box. But how, I thought, could I breathe life into these poor substitutes, humble postcards that we are meant to buy just to send someone a quick “hello”? Still, I felt that there was leaven in this dough, and in the end, it was poetry that worked its magic.

I started by making spontaneous associations between the works in response to certain triggers that set my thoughts in motion. I then sent those images to two authors, E.D. Blodgett and Réjean Beaudoin, who undertook to give a voice to them and explain the message that brewed under the surface by shedding light on the relationships between the works. I stepped aside, as it were, to watch this literary work of over 180 prose poems develop, created by the two writers as they brought out the deep humanity that animates these works of art.

My Postcard Collection, Afterword