 Australian artist Kylie Stillman carves images in the sides of books. See here work here. I first saw a mention of it here. Once I looked around the web for more references, I found this great comment from Lee Kottner about Stillman: “Her book stack carvings remind me of the elaborate fore-edge paintings in their distortion of the book. In this case, instead of fanning the book to create a canvas, she disregards the boundaries of the book, like covers, to make a sculptural surface.” |
This past weekend I went to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe plaza. There were all sorts of crafts, including papercuts (called papel picado in Spanish). They are so intricate, and I thought, not for the first time, about trying one myself. I also saw a demonstration of tinwork — decorations punched into tin (see some examples here) — and I got to look at several punches.
When I got home, I found this page about papel picado that says the designs are sometimes cut the same way as tinwork: “the artisan … cuts through multiple layers of paper using a mallet to pound finely sharpened chisels of varying sizes and shapes through the paper and into the sheet of lead.” (Who knew? I assumed they used scissors or an xacto blade!)
Today, courtesy of Steve Mehallo’s blog, I found a seemingly easier papercutting method — shadow typography done by Seree Kang — see below. You can see more of her work here including a variation she calls “Cube Typography.”
Photographing artist’s books can be tricky and frustrating — getting the lighting right, staging the book to show off all its features… The 23 Sandy Gallery blog recently had a 2 part post on “What Makes a Good Photograph for Submission to a Juried Show or Gallery” (which also applies to photographing your work for selling online). Part I is here and Part 2 is here.
Since moving to Santa Fe, I’ve used Google’s map feature a lot. But it hasn’t been particularly helpful for figuring out where to ride my bike… While there’s a “biking directions” switch, showing bike lanes as well as roads that are only open to pedestrians and bikes, it doesn’t show elevation. There are a lot of hills here in Santa Fe, very few bike lanes, and some roads have shoulders and some don’t. There are several bike groups that have weekly rides, and I’ve joined them a few times, which has helped me figure out where to ride on my own. I’ve also used my android phone to help me — there’s an app called MyTracks that uses GPS to plot my route as I’m pedaling. It tallies mileage and that all important elevation (of course after the fact, after I’ve sweated up some very steep hill). Although the other day it went haywire and decided I’d started my 1 hour ride from the middle of the ocean, east of Greenland, and ended up near Winnamucca, Nevada, with a very impressive max speed of 817mph (see map above).
After that ride, I found BikeRouteToaster. It let me easily draw a route and then estimates the time it would take me to bike it, shows the elevation profile of the route and best of all creates a “cue sheet” — listing streets, turns and mileage between turns. No info about shoulders and road conditions, I guess I’ll have to figure that out on my own.
I’ll continue to explore (and struggle with) ways of making maps and directions. But I also wanted to mention mapplers, a project to build an atlas of hand-drawn maps, and use the Google maps interface to navigate them. They only have one at the moment (Brisbane Australia), but check them out here.
After I wrote about my calendar experiments, Nancy wrote me a comment about her suminigashi broadsides — that’s one to the left, with a Basho haiku. You can see more of Nancy’s marbling and broadsides here on Flickr or read her blog (where she talks about lots more than marbling!) here.
Several times over the past couple of months, I’ve played around with Japanese paper marbling (suminagashi) with my friend Suzanne. She likes to work very big — making covers for large journals — but I thought working small and incorporating my haiku would work well for me. I’ve begun experimenting with some of my colored Japanese paper (mostly a large stash of Moriki, made from Kozo). Here’s one of my tries to the left — I started with yellow paper, printed my evolving calendar design first, and then marbled. My plan was to do an all-letterpress calendar, as I’ve done in the past, but now I’m thinking I may do some months with letterpress designs and some incorporating other methods, like suminagashi.