Featured Artist at Moleskinerie.com: Barry Silver

I bought my first moleskin right before a trip to India in 2002. I think it was the inside pocket that sold me.  I had never been much for writing in journals, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I wanted some way to record my experiences, so I threw a glue stick and some Chart Pak markers in my bag. I found that they react great with the heavy weight journal paper, they kind of bleed and have a water color quality to them. Before I knew it, I was pasting anything I could get my hands on in that book:

boarding passes, receipts, matchbooks, Hindu God pictures, photos of the many faces I encountered…you name it.

  I ended up staying in India for three months that trip, and I filled the last page of that first book just as I was heading back home. It became and has remained the premiere medium for expression and documentation of my travels and experiences. Most of my work tends to be India-centric since I travel there often and the imagery is so profound, but a lot of it is autobiographical, and some of it is simply humorous or absurd. One thing I find, it’s often the accidents or so called mistakes that turn out best.
It’s extremely liberating to paste and tear and cut with reckless abandon, always knowing that it’s fixable or perhaps even perfect in it’s imperfections. Most of all, for me it is both fun and therapeutic. And I need lots of both.