What I Do

Announcing a new page on my sidebar: Gallery of Student Work .

Now, here’s the back story.

 

A Page from my files

Last week,  at my daughter’s school. when I was bemoaning that my work schedule precluded my attendance at the next parent meeting,  a parent that I have known for years, and who l very much like, asked me what I do. It is hard to explain to people what it is that I do, which is one reason that I keep a blog.  But I realized that if I sent Lauri a link to my blog she would have to do a good bit of sifting through posts and more posts to see what I do.

Part of Pinterest Page for Bookzoompa

It occurred to me to direct her to Pinterest, to look at pins from Bookzoompa, but I this didn’t seem like the best solution, either.  It made me sad to realize that this blog hadn’t made it easy to answer the “What do you do?” question. But I had an idea. This is my idea:  http://bookzoompa.wordpress.com/gallery-of-student-work/  It’s a new page on the sidebar of my blog, which simply is photo after photo of work done by students that I have worked with.  Soon I hope to add more pages: one which puts all my tutorials in one place;  and another that shows the work that I do when I am not working with students.

Please take a peek at this new page and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Rembrandt and Jose

I decided I needed some help with a two-hour workshop that I was leading this past weekend. I looked towards two artists, Rembrandt van Rijn, Dutch painter 1606- 1669, and Jose Gaytan, Brooklyn photographer, 1949-2011, for support.

Here’s one of Rembrandt’s drawings:

Dutch Landscape by Rembrandt van Rijn

and here’s a landscape photographed by Jose ;

Brooklyn Landscape by Jose Gaytan

What these two gentlemen have in common, besides having both died in their early sixties, is the way that their works betray the fact that their eyes were wide open to the world in front of them. This openness, this posture of yes , is where I wanted to begin. Rather than actually teach I wanted these talented, interesting, smart workshop participants to spend their time working from a place in themselves that reenforced exploration and moving forward.

After showing a 6 minute and 40 second movie of insightful clips that I snipped  from TED talks – from talks by Elizabeth Gilbert,  Brene Brown, and Mina Bissell -  I laid out a pile of intentionally low quality black and white copies of works by Rembrandt, by Jose, and also by Elizabeth Murray, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, and Georgia O’Keefe. Again, I chose these artists’ works based on the way that I sense that their interface with the world was remarkably open.

Working on images by Matisse, Murray, and O’Keefe

After I laid out prismacolor pencils, black markers, glue, colored paper and scissors, we reworked the images of the masters. My hope is that by responding to masters’ work we give ourselves the gift of integrating great influences. After people got to work I just hung out a tried not to interupt.

This workshop was the quietest workshop that I’ve ever led. After awhile I finally had to interupt the work so that we could actually do some bookmaking. We hinged together two of the 8 1/2″ x 11″ papers that we had worked on, so that each person had a single 11″ x 17″ paper. We used this to make a V-Pockets Book Cover.

Last step was to make pages by cutting other papers in half, then fold them in half.

Pages were sewn in using a simple pamphlet stitch, embellished with beads.

I have to mention that  I was very happy with the way that people seemed to be involved with their work, and I was delighted by their results, too.

The last ten minutes of workshop was spent looking at each others books.

It seemed to me that the morning was a great success.

PS…At the end of my last post I mentioned that have copies of the BASIS 2012 catalogue to give away for the asking. That offer is still open. Don’t be shy! No use having them sitting on my shelf.

You’re Invited

Detail of Hanging Book “Steamed Kale and Garlic” by Paula Krieg

This Saturday, July 21, 2012,, from 3:00 to 5:00,  there will be  a reception (art party?) at the North Main Gallery in Salem as part of the Book Arts Summer In Salem event.  Featured artists will include Johanne Renbeck ,  eight Salem area students, and me.

True to the nature of book arts, it was easier to take interesting photos of the pieces in the show than it was to take photos which actually gave  a good idea of what the works look like in 3-D.

Detail of “Rise Up From the Water” by Joanne Renbeck

The exhibition of Joanne Renbeck’s books, in the spacious gallery annex, includes some structures that reference traditional bookbinding, but most of the room is filled with ethereal, hanging, books  whose pages linger between opaque and transparent, offering different visual treats as the light plays with the surfaces while the viewer walks around the room.

On exhibition in the north wall of the main gallery are eight multi-dimensional tunnel books designed, constructed and editioned by students  who, this spring, worked with Ruth Sauer and Ed Hutchins.

Cordell’s Bike Race Tunnel Book

The subject for these books include “Fishing in the Rain,” “Welcome to Salem” “The Garden” and …..

Seth’s Washington County Fair Tunnel Book

…the Washington County Fair, which is the main event of the summer in these here parts.

And on the south wall of the main gallery are some pieces by yours truly. Most of the work that I created for this show reflected the fact that I like covering book board with my paste papers, that  I like tying knots and that I have been trying to think about certain foods more, after having seen a TED talk by William Li. Long and thin, and, technically accordion books, trying to take photos of them just didn’t work out for me, but I liked the photos of the details.

Most of the foods that I drew were locally sourced, from my back yard, though some came from Slack Hollow Farms, and a few from the from the grocery store.

Detail from my Parsley and Rosemary Book

I’ve also put together a table of some of the books that I use as prototypes for the classroom book arts classes that I teach.

It’s such a pleasure to be a part of a show in this remarkable gallery located in this lovely town.  Do stop in if you happen to be in the area.

Guaranteed, it’s worth the trip.

Mary Howe In Salem NY, Works and Workshops

Mary Howe, center

 

This past weekend, as part of Book Arts Summer In Salem Mary Howe installed a show of her work at Ruth Sauer’s North Main Gallery, and taught two workshops.  I didn’t miss a minute of it.  Viewing the show and taking classes with fellow book arts affectionatos was, to say the least, reinvigorating .

 

 

This window sign, which is a roll of Tyvek with paper cuttings, was created by Mary especially for her show.  This kind of attention to detail permeates every bit of Mary’s work.

 

A Shelf of Book Arts by Mary Howe

 

North Main Gallery installed a long bookshelf on their north wall, especially to showcase Mary’s work.

 

  Many of  Mary’s works reference small, even microscopic living things, such as insects and sea creatures. During a conversation with Mary I found out that she spends a portion of her time in Maine collecting water samples from the ocean to help with the official monitoring of creatures that causes the beautiful but toxic red tide that threatens the local coastline.

 

 

 

Mary’s books are most often books within books. This red book is part of a piece that deals with artifacts around Mary’s involvement with her red tide data.

Mary was sure to point out that this structure, the flag book, is a structure that was developed and popularized by Hedi Kyle. We all owe such a debt of gratitude  to Hedi for the visual and architectural vocabulary of contemporary book arts, that I was pleased that Mary wanted to be clear about where the inspiration for this book originated. The workshop that I will be teaching in three weeks  will also be a Heid Kyle structure, known as the Blizzard Book.

Getting Ready to Make Paste Papers

Saturday morning’s workshop was all about making paste papers.  Mary likes using Menthol Cellulose as the medium, Golden paints for color, and Canson Mi-tients papers for her surface.

 

For any one who would like to look at extremely informatives tutorials about Paste Papers, I recommend taking a look at the links on  Hilke Kurzke’s tutorial page . For anyone who wants a mildly informative article, take a look at my post on paste papers.

 

 You can’t see it here, there’s a sheet of clear mylar on top of the newspaper.  This is a great idea:  using a mylar sheet to address the need for a light-weight, portable, easy to clean surface to make paste papers on. In this photo, a brilliant participant realized that he could also use the mylar sheet as a palette for various colors of paste.  In a workshop situation, it’s uncomfortable to give everyone a full palette of colors as that leads to a lot of wasted paint: putting a selection of colors on the mylar worked out really well.

 Workshop #2  was all about folding: boxes, books, maps and….

 

… a “staging” card. I think that this structure was the majority favorite. The ones we made were larger than this one.

  

 

As a group, we made quite a bit of work.

 

 

Here’s my end of the day photo. Love that sign.