History of Greeting Card Stationery

I can hardly remember a time when I did not make some kind of card stationery.  I probably started to do so in the 1950s in Melita when I first printed my own Christmas cards at the New Era. Later, when I was living in Brandon in the early 1960s, I did a Christmas card commission for George and Mary Gooden.  The lino cut image was an abstract design based

on a Three Wise Men theme. In Boissevain in the late 1960s I did a three-color lino cut card for myself for

Christmas and printed an original poem on the inside.  For a subsequent Christmas I had an engraving made of an India ink drawing of a peacock-like bird and printed the image on parchment paper in colored ink. I seem to have no record of any cards I might have made during the subsequent years I spent in Brandon (1969-1972) but I did

return to the bird theme for the publicity for the exhibition I had at the home of Rolf and

Connie Pedersen. The bird design appeared on the poster and in the Brandon Sun advertisement.  Sometime after I moved to Winnipeg in 1972 I picked up the bird theme again and brought out a series of hasty note cards.  Most of the images on these were of stylized birds.  This series was first printed by silk screen by Doug Brolund in Brandon, but a later edition I had printed in Winnipeg. In the early 1970s, hairdresser Philip Adam saw these bird cards and asked me

to design a card to announce the opening of his new salon. For this I again used a bird motif.

Just what I did about Christmas cards during these intervening years is unclear to me now, but in the early 1980s I seem to have begun making original cards with metallic ink resist and watercolor and the first of these was probably the result of my search for something to send at Christmastime. The early cards in this medium were popular and I was soon

making them in fairly large quantities and sold a great many over a period of several years. I continued to make these cards into the late 1990s, though in smaller quantities, and it's likely that I produced more than two thousand all together.  (In the fall of 1989 I made and offered for sale a number of calendars using images also generated with this same watercolor and metallic ink technique.)

In the early and mid-1980s I brought out another hasty note series using a new graphics technique, a technique which I had been using to develop graphics for exhibition invitations. This technique involved the use of white conté masking and black inks to develop new images on top of screened newspaper photographs. The big advantage was that parts of the tonal values in the

newspaper photos could be retained and were reproducible on photocopiers or could be printed by offset without putting them through a screening process. These hasty note cards were of landscape themes and were all reproduced by photocopier. I also had eight and one-half by eleven inch photo copy prints of these images available.

The watercolor and metallic ink technique for producing cards was the medium of choice for my own Christmas cards for several years, but by the 1990s I was looking around for something new.  For my Christmas cards in 1992 I had original size reproductions made of a small format pastel done in Assiniboine Park that fall.  I matted these reproductions and affixed them to cards and made some extras to sell. At about this same time I was also making larger cards with matted, original, "fixed" pastel images.  Most of these were of autumn themes.  Many

were done out-of-doors or sitting in my car using themes from Assiniboine Park.  Because they were "originals" and larger, they were priced accordingly.

For a couple of years in the mid-1990s I made my Christmas cards using a cut paper technique, building up images with pieces of colored paper on a black ground to derive a look which sometimes resembled stain glass. I also made a few of these to sell. 

Feeling a need to busy myself with some image-making in February 1999, I did some larger format pastels based on the composition of a photograph that my

friend Cathy had given me and which I liked very much.  Cathy had taken the picture when she, Greg and I were in the Agassiz Forest for our fall picnic on October 20, 1989.  After a couple of successful pastels using the aspen theme from the photograph, I decided to try making a lino cut using a similar composition. While working in the lino cut medium I found myself wondering what would happen if I pressed dampened hand-made paper into a lino

cut. I tried it and the result was very encouraging.  I had a quite successful embossed image.  After the first tests I set about making lino cuts for the express purpose of taking embossed images from them and I produced about ten different designs to be reproduced in this fashion.. I subsequently matted the images, affixed the mats to cards and packaged them with envelopes.  In total I produced about one hundred of these embossed cards, repeating each image about ten times after I had "manufactured" additional sheets of hand-made paper.

Shortly before Christmas, 1999, I asked Cathy if she had need of any watercolor Christmas cards.  She said that she could use a few  so I set about making some. In the process I was thinking about what I might do for Christmas cards for myself.  In the spring I had bought some gold pulver powder thinking to use it to guild some of my lino cut images, but I had abandoned the idea.  The powder had remained on my desk and I got to

wondering what would happen if I drew images with white glue and then dusted

them with the pulver powder. I tried it and it proved to be very effective so I pursued this technique. Using white paper I drew a number of Christmassy motifs—holly leaves, stars, fir trees, etc.—, gilded them and mounted these images in mats which I later affixed to cards.  Some of these I sent off to friends and relatives, but I bagged a lot of them, thinking to sell them at my pre-Christmas studio show.  Thinking that I might need some others for

my own use I experimented with using the same glue and gold dust on colored pastel paper.  By this time I was totally bored with cliché Christmas motifs and therefore began to play with some abstract patterns mostly based on intersecting lines. While perhaps not to everyone's taste, I felt that these final cards were the best outcomes of the new technique.

After I acquired a scanner and a digital camera in 2002 I began to produce a series of matted cards whose images were reproductions of paintings. Most recently I have begun to produce some matted cards with original photographic images.  There’s always  something new.