True Colors - Linn Jacobs

TRUE COLORS

Linn Jacobs

Yellowgreen & Copper

Of the fifteen original participants in True Colors, it is with sadness that I need to say that one of these gifted artists, Linn Jacobs, is no longer with us. Two of her friends from the project generously shared some thoughts about Linn.

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Lynne Perrella
A Remembrance of Linn Jacobs

When it comes to Mail Art and Collaborations, I feel like one of the dinosaurs. When I recently looked through a big trunk in our guest room, full-to-brimming with Mail Art, it was like time travel at its best. Imagine? – a whole community of artists exchanging Artwork through the Mail…..before computers!

Linn and I knew a lot of the same people in Correspondence and Book Arts but had never actually connected. It was like being part of the same solar system, but spinning in different orbits. Luckily, I ended up being in an art exchange with Linn’s daughter Lesley, and that opened the door to all of us getting acquainted – not only through sharing art, but also meeting at Artfest for a few memorable years. One of my favorite remembrances is having both mother and daughter in my classes, on different days, and seeing their strong shared affinity for lavish crisp color. Hand either of them a checkerboard stencil, or a piece of sequin scrim, and just stand back!

Linn was a masterful quote wrangler, as well as an inveterate list-maker. Many-if-not-all of her True Colors pages included long slender tags of hand-made or specialized papers, inscribed with her distinctive rounded hand-writing. The tags listed……things that are White, the colors of Fall, the shades of a sunset. Always with graceful strands of silky threads and fibers to hold them in place…..Very Linn. I always featured her, sitting at her art table writing out each tag, working fast to keep up with her quick playful mind – and then looking up and finding dozens of tags – and then turning those over to use the backs, too.

More, more, and more. Always more. I wish we had more time with Linn – more time to enjoy her warm generous spirit, her kind heart, her huge talent, and her way with words. She contributed so much to our group, and we’ll remember her always.

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Marylinn Kelly
For Linn Jacobs

Not trusting my memory, I did a bit research in the TC text to be certain: yes, Linn Jacobs' Yellowgreen and Copper journal was the first one I received. My paragraph there tells how I began to feel my way into our exchange and, toward the end of the project, with the experience of many contributions achieved, eventually asked for the opportunity to rework my pages in her book.

Throughout the process, Linn and I emailed each other frequently and had a few chances to speak on the phone. Linn was generously open to my recounting of family lore, particularly as it involved my artist mother and her influence on my eccentric passions. We had a connection that touched lightly on challenges we both faced, yet the volume, the real substance, of our traded stories was optimism, a state about which I am not confused: it absolutely is a gift.

I feel we shared a view of life that always reminded there was good in everything. This was a woman who wrote in the introduction to her journal, "I love boggy places." Looking today at the pages she created for Sunset, I find in her circle/spiral motifs an expression of wholeness, completeness, overlaid by bright tendrils, rays of the sun that eventually reach every corner. The words that passed between us, her unmistakable joy of each moment, are treasured pieces of the light she embodied.