A needful read that might help, puke inducing, and an artistic statement of note...
Yesterday I went to a designer's website to find it was no longer there. My task this morning was to try and sort out what happened to the site but it did get me thinking.
Maybe it's just that since I'm of a certain age but I worry these days about how easy it is for the good work of various artists, writers, and designers to fall out of availability when they fall out of fashion or die.
A while back, after confronting my own mortality, I decided that I wanted to reread a bunch of books that I look back on as pivotal to my development. Partly to revisit my youth but mostly just to try and capture feelings of wonder when confronted with ideas that shook my world at the time.
Do you want to know what happened?
I found that most all of those books are now out of print so Amazon doesn't have them and while the search continues neither does Abe's Books. It's like they've just disappeared.
Which brings me to designers of sailboats. Most designers are a one-man-band as they market themselves, do the actual designs, and then sell their older designs as stock plans. The thing is that once a designer retires or dies there is often little or nothing done to protect their body of work for future generations.
There's a couple of designs I'd love to get my hands on. In one case, the designer died with no family and the whereabouts of his designs are a mystery. In the other, the designs are being held by the decedents but their take on selling a set of plans is that it would be too much work to bother with.
So, when I see a designer I admire fall off the internet, I worry. Not just for the designer in question but about what might happen to their collective work.
None of us like to admit that we're only temporary guests on this mortal merry-go-round. Face it, it's kind of depressing. But it gets a whole lot more depressing if that after we've left the party that the work accomplished fades away.
Listening to St Paul and the Broken Bones
So it goes...
