All You Have To Depend On

I'd love to get back to my latest block, but with the show in Iowa coming up in just about a month, I have to start some of the time consuming preparations. The most important of those is building boxes to ship the work. This will be my largest ever shipping effort.

I started building custom shipping boxes as far back as 1995, when I had to mail a framed print from Carbondale to Evanston for a juried show. That one box made trips all over the country over the next few years, along with several others made in subsequent years. These were all designed to hold one or two framed prints. The philosophy behind my shipping boxes is that I can't control what happens to them after they leave my hands, so I make them as strong and secure as possible, to make sure that my art arrives on time and intact. These early boxes all included double wall construction (inner and outer boxes each with its own closing end flaps), often were lined with bubble wrap, yet designed to open easy on one end.

Then came 2001, when I had been offered a small solo show at a school in Florida. They wanted 16 prints from my saint series. So I built two larger boxes, each designed to hold 8 framed prints. The top photo shows one of those boxes. A double strength inner corrugated box, held within a double layered outside box, with additional cardboard and panels of scrap lauan secured in between. The 8 framed prints were individually wrapped in bubble wrap with sheets of corrugated in between. The inner box had a closing flap, and the outer box had two closing flaps. Closed the lid and sealed with tape. The gallery director in Miami, the late Fr. Jorge Sardinas, was amazed by these boxes- strong, easy to open, and not a single styrofoam peanut to clean up. In fact, he even brought one out during the reception to show everyone this box I had used to send the work.

Those boxes will be used again this time, but now I also have to ship another 30 or so prints from two additional series. I have boxes for these that are fine for when I carry them to shows myself, but now I need something much stronger. It had been so long since I made those saint boxes, I brought one with me to the Studio, to refamiliarize myself with how I did it. I have several large sheets of cardboard scrounged from one of my jobs, which I've been saving for this occasion. Measured one of the frames from my supermarket set, and used that to figure the inside dimensions of my inner box. That scored and cut piece is what's shown in the second photo. The initial calculations took a while, so today I only got as far as assembling that one inner box, but I have extensive notes and diagrams of what I did today. Just need to copy what I did today for a second one, and change a few numbers to come up with the measurements for two boxes for Ecclesiastes prints. More of a problem will be the outer boxes, since they will require larger pieces of cardboard than the ones I have, if I want to make the outer box from one piece, and that is my preference. I've got time to track those down.