New copper is bright and shiny, just like babies. As it ages, copper acquires a patina. American cities on the left coast don’t have the patina of age as many of the cities in Europe do. People who have aged gracefully acquire an elegant patina. Today’s deposit into the ‘Joy Jar’ is an elegant patina.
Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents pots and pans / the used things, warm with generations of human touch, essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004)
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We don’t know exactly how they were built, presumably people who worked on site were asked to just build them. Sometimes, like in the studios, we just accepted the patina of paint that had accrued over time and just left it as a kind of found surface, which distinguishes and differentiates the rooms.
Thomas Payne
“In a global capital like New York, neither people nor buildings have the chance to accumulate the patina of age. Most residents are not born there, neither do they live in the same house for generations, and the physical fabric of the city is constantly changing around them.”
Sharon Zukin, Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss
After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?
(Ernst Toller)
“Patina is the value that age puts on an object”
John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in his “open source” column for November 22, 2009, “On Thanksgiving: the memorial that time forgot”
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