Well-being 1 by Valerie Roybal

Good morning, collectors. It's Sara, writing from a finally-feeling-spring-ish New York. It's humid and warm—you can't help but be reminded that the city, for all its concrete, is surrounded by water and dappled with parks—cherry trees are starting to bloom, crocuses are coming out of the ground. It's cliché but, really, things are starting to feel new again.

It's about this time of year that we usually bring you a new edition from the perennially-popular artist Valerie Roybal: Well-being 1 is her fifth. Well-loved on 20x200, Valerie's work is celebrated in much broader circles, too; it's most recently been included in the book Cutting Edges, published by Gestalten earlier this year.

Like the work featured in the book, and in her previous 20x200 editions, Valerie's collected, culled, cut and arranged bits of ephemera—pages from old encyclopedias, postcards, letters, found photographs—making them all new again. Well-being 1 is a bit like spring itself, especially as described by E.E. Cummings.

Spring is like a perhaps hand

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

–E. E. Cummings