My first art thesis was titled Comraderie in Landscape.

 

I was twenty years old, and I didn't fully understand what I meant by it at the time.

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Landscapes have always been my subject, but they've never been what my work is actually about. Environments are the stage on which we discover what it means to be human, the place we stand when we finally slow down long enough to notice something or take action.  My paintings are always searching for that meaning of longing. About the particular weight of a season, the quality of light at a specific hour, the feeling of a place that stays in the mind long after you've left it.

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The Postcard Club is that same impulse extended into a different kind of making.

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I started printing my watercolors onto postcards a few years ago and using them to reach out to people I'd lost touch with. A postcard is a small thing, but it does something a text message cannot: it proves that someone stopped, thought of you, and made the effort. It arrives in your hand. It has weight.

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What I found was that the problem wasn't that I didn't care about the people in my life. It was that nothing in my daily routine made space for that caring to become action. The Postcard Club is my attempt to build that space.

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Each month you'll receive something to hold, something to read, and something to send. The stamps are already enclosed. The only friction between you and writing to someone is deciding who needs a piece of mail right now.

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That's what this is for.

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— Jonathon Engelien, Apocalyptic Nostalgia