Cartolines

My Mother loves real mail, old fashioned, handwritten envelopes, with first class postage, and USPS delivered to her own personal mailbox. So everywhere I travel I take the time to send postcards. Find em, pick em out, buy the special postcard stamps, sit and write till my fingers hurt, then find a postbox, post office or hotel concierge to actually get them headed her way. I do this several times so cards arrive for days. Why not? She loves them, I love her. Simple math really.

Until I visited Italy. There’s so much to love about Italy; omg the food, the wine, the people, the language, the history, the views, the crafts, the art, the architecture, so much, unless you’re a postcard… Those cards I sat and wrote in a cafe on a beautiful day in Portofino? Those ‘special’ postcard stamps I paid a fortune for? Yeah, it took months for them to get to my Mom. They’d just show up randomly one by one. Very odd. But she loved them! Loved the photos of different views and vistas. She speaks little bits of lots of languages so she asked, how do you say postcard in Italian? Yep. Cartoline. So now, every month or so I paint a view or a vista, on a collection of odd sized canvases I have, give them a number and add it to my Cartoline collection to send out to the world to enjoy as a visual memory of a few moments writing to my Mom in the Italian sunshine. Grazie Mama, Ciao – Alison Haley Paul