I liked the caption on these book pages, called “Excerpt: Six out of 16 Books, 2007” and the treatment is acrylic and mixed media on books. The caption is
It’s a narrative
… told in fragments
Fragments are more interesting, anyway
No good telling you
Everything. You guess why.
Seen here.
The speaker at this month’s Santa Fe Book Arts Group was Randall Hasson, a local painter and calligrapher. He took a semester course in Book Arts, where the goal was to create a book in InDesign and publish it on Blurb. He decided his book would be a collaboration with a poet friend, Chris Baron. While Hasson had been working on his ideas for combining painting and calligraphy in bound journals, he apparently hadn’t done anything with sequential, related pages. In his lecture, Hasson talked about the 2 poems he’s done thus far, taking us through his design decisions, materials, techniques and research into the imagery he would use. You can see the first poem on Blurb here.
I found the second poem (a piece of a spread is shown below and there’s another spread here), much more compelling. In both pieces, it was interesting to see how his background in calligraphy informed the page layout.
This altered book, by Malena Valcárcel, is inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem. Notice that the poem encircles the book shelf…
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
Nicholas Jones is a book sculpture who carves, cuts, sculpts, folds, tears and sews old books. Here are a few examples, but you can see all his work here.
High Coup, a sculpted book
Bookworm Ensconced, a torn and sewn book
Christmas Island, a cut book
When I told my sister about my artist in a matchbox series, she reeled off a list of artists I should consider. One name was Joseph Beuys. She didn’t know much about him other than he’s a favorite with one of her friends. What I knew was this bunny by Shannah Burton, which I saw soon after I started selling on Etsy and that I’d bookmarked intending to find out more “someday.”
Turns out that Beuys has a famous performance piece, How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare, where, holding a dead hare in his arms, he walked around, whispering to the hare, explaining the art on the walls. He also used felt in his installations and performances, like this one, called Homogeneous Infiltration for Piano
Beuys, a German who served in the German army during World War II, said the red cross is a symbol for the danger that people face when they remain silent. The work strikes me as sad, with the sound (and potential) of the instrument trapped inside the felt skin. As a viewer, I want to tear off the felt and unmute the piano.
For my artist in a matchbox series, I’m looking for artists whose art lends itself to books. So in the spirit of Beuys, I designed a matchbox containing a banned book, one that has been silenced not only by felt but humans. Here it is, and you can see more pictures here.
