“Pay Stub Sunset” Print

September 2024

30” wide x 40” high

This is a large giclée print on heavy archival matte paper.

The original is made from 1950s-1960s railway punch card pay stubs, ink-washed 1920s ledger paper, ink-washed 1880s railway shares

So this is a fun find: railway punch card pay stubs.  We use the word pay stubs today, but they used to be a real analog thing.  Accountants calculated the amounts owed with a punchcard machine and another machine that read the perforations in the cards.

This collage took a bit of a journey to get to where it is.  I started out with a layer of black chalk paint.  I knew I was going to use the pay stubs as the ocean water, so I wanted the perforations to show up as black.  But when I started arranging the cards, I liked the way they looked with some black triangles showing in between.  You can see it in the process shot.

But once I’d finished gluing all the parts and stood back to look at it, something felt wrong.  The black triangles stole the show and took away from the yellow sun reflecting on the water.  So I went back to the drawing board and covered all the black with more pay stubs.  Now the water looks choppy, but not distractingly so.  I like a little chaos, but not too much.