Books as Sequence

At lunch today, as I idly paged through the Sunday paper, I recognized the images above. They brought back a flood of memories about the year long artists book class I took in 2001 at the San Francisco Center for the Book. As part of the course, we read excerpts from Johanna Drucker’s The Century Of Artists’ Books. These excerpts were supremely frustrating because there weren’t any pictures, just prose descriptions. After one class where we discussed books as a linear sequence, I somehow found all the pictures from a book by Ida Applebroog that was mentioned and made my own copy. Her drawings were primitive, and it gave me inspiration (or permission?) to use my own rather crude images in my own books.
The article about Applebroog is interesting. But even more so is this PBS documentary, part of the art:21 series. She starts off talking about making books at the beginning of her career, and also shows her techniques and working methods for her other artwork. (If you watch the documentary, there’s another artist featured first, so click on the 4th icon in the control bar at the bottom of the video, to start at “Chapter 4 of 16.”)