Eventually, I hit
on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I
experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of
the old pictures.
The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked
like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir
pillow on Auntie's armchair in the living room, which had whorls of
paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried
to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.
And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared
behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water
levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently
sketched. I'd seen a *Polka Dot Door* episode where the hosts showed how
you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a
sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the
image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.
That's what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my
grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture,
using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the
surface of the photo.
And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was,
where it wasn't. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the
photos.
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