Crafting Vacation Memories with Maps

Map of Florence by John Petach

The Brush Used for the Map of Florence

John’s Napa Valley Map

Napa Brush

How many of you still use maps? I mean the old fashioned kind that you can actually hold in your hands and spread out on a kitchen table. You know, the maps that you can rarely fold up exactly how you found them. It is hard sometimes to line up the creases but when you do it’s oh-so gratifying. And when you don’t, you hopefully let it go, shrug and feel content with the big overall perspective that the map you just looked at provided.

Artist John Petach

You definitely don’t achieve that perspective or level of satisfactory map studying from an electronic map on one of your devices. No matter how much you zoom in and out, it just isn’t the same. And plus, that zooming business only works properly a fraction of the time. No, it’s nice to have something to hold in your hands, particularly since there’s so much beauty to be found in maps. 

Through my work with Discovery Map, I even found someone that possesses a sort of map fetish. Artist John Petach loves travel and maps so much that he was inspired to create a collection of works that uses maps as canvas. I think they’re marvelous and I hope you’ll check them out here. You’ll see that he thinks Discovery Maps are great, so he created a number of pieces using their maps as the background.

Yosemite

Check out my Discovery Map story on John to find out more about his work and his relationship with DM maps and others. I enjoyed learning about his creative process–did you ever consider that a Métro card from Paris could work as a palette knife? Yes, he uses objets from his travels to create his unique works. Very clever.

I hope these stories will inspire you to make artwork from the memorabilia you collect during your travels. Or at the very least, maybe you’ll start looking at traditional maps as works of art, use them more and take your head out of your iPhone.

John is part of Artists Guild San Francisco, San Fran’s premier outdoor art gallery, founded in 1961.