Making Handmade Books

Making Another Felt Book (2): Needlefelted Areas

2012-02-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

To add large blocks of color to your wet-felted fabric you can use pieces of wool sweaters, other wool scraps—perhaps from previous felting projects—or you can needlefelt the dry wool roving to the dry felt. You will probably want both a single felting needle and a multi-needle tool, both available at some craft stores and also through online sources such as Black Sheep Designs.

Take the roving and lightly needlefelt it in place, tacking it down to start. Use the multi-needle tool to affix most of it. Go back to the single needle and clean up the edges. You'll be able to see how much fiber you have felted through by looking at the back. It is up to you if you want to make the new area perfectly flat or leave raised areas. For this little clementine (or The Big Orange Splot) I wanted the edges secure and flat, but the center slightly raised.

To Bind: machine or hand sew the folded page to the center of the cover. See this post for an example with multiple pages, but the idea is the same.

Next up: (Creative Process and) Finishing

The Exquisite Corpse in Writing & Art

2012-02-20T08:24:00.000-08:00

Someone told me recently that she was not sure how one might go about making up a character. I know my characters are composites: hair from an old friend, shoes from a neighbor, the walk of someone I've seen on the street. I've had to explain that writing isn't about pulling ideas out of one's imagination kicking and screaming, it's more like an exquisite corpse or a menu: one from column A, one from column B, and so on.

Here is an interesting exercise to try. Divide a piece of paper into columns. Write down things like "hair" or "shoes" or "hats" and go out into the world and collect information: all the kinds of hair you see in one day; the types of shoes and who wears them; the kinds of hats different ages of people have; older people; college students; children, etc.. Keep the lists for character references.

Exquisite Corpse or Cadavre exquis began as a Surrealist game in the 1920s. Before I knew anything about the Surrealists I was taught to make "folded stories" in elementary school. Everyone in the game has a piece of paper and writes a sentence or two, leaving a couple of words on the line below. Fold the paper so just the couple words are showing. Pass it to the next person, who continues the story where you left off. The first person might write about a mountain and leave "then it became covered with" on the exposed line. The second person might finish with the word "chocolate" and write about something completely different. Continue the process until the page is filled. Unfold the paper and read the absurd story aloud. The first piece from the Surrealists' game was "The exquisite / corpse/ will drink / the new / wine," which is how it got its name. They eventually expanded this process to include drawings and collages. In 1992, The Silver Buckle Press at the University of Wisconsin at Madison organized A Printer's Exquisite Corpse. You can see all the parts at the link: heads, upper torsos, lower torsos and feet. Interactive slide show here. It was so successful that they launched Exquisite Horse, A Printer's Corpse in 1997. Each letterpress artist got a card indicating where the parts should join together when assembled so she could plan her section.

How do you get ideas for the parts? Bob Glück recently suggested "plein air" writing. The term is usually used for paintings that are created outside "in the open air" and when the artist is looking directly at the subject rather than painting from photographs (or from online images) or from the imagination. Bob used it to describe a writing exercise. He suggested I sit in a café and choose a person, note how old he is, how he moves, the gestures, how he arranges things, what he does when he speaks, etc.. Write it all down, and then layer it onto the page. "This will freshen up your characters," he said. We've probably all heard the old writing saw about "show don't tell;" now we can really understand what it means.

Making Another Felt Book (1): Layered Color

2012-02-17T07:54:00.000-08:00

For this felt book you wet-felt three layers of dry wool roving into one sturdy piece of fabric that does not ravel or tear. A benefit of this process is that you can use different a color for each layer. Contrasting colors work well. In this example, the outer layers are dark blues, purples, and blacks, and the inner layer is peach, light brown and dark brown. For added interest, include some mesh and fabric in the inner layer. Once the wool has been completely felted you can use a small sharp scissors to cut through an outer layer and expose the inner colors.

See Making a Felt Book for detailed instructions on wet-felting.

First layer

Beginning second layer

Second layer with included fabrics

Second layer

Third layer

Wet-felting the layers

The felt

Cutting one page and a cover

Trimming the page to fit

Cutting into one layer

Exposing the mesh fabric

Cutting into one layer

Exposing the inner layer color

Next up: Needlefelting large areas of color

Save the Paper Mail

2012-02-14T07:56:00.000-08:00

Here it is, Valentine's Day. I wasn't going to mention it, let alone post anything remotely related to it, but something appeared in my IN box that seemed worthy of note on this particular day.

The post card. The U.S. mail. We've probably noticed fear building up around the decline of snail mail (can we call it paper mail, instead?). We hear rumors that our post office boxes will be closed and that Saturday delivery will be ended. Some cities and towns have had closures already. Who is to blame? We are. We like our fast technology so we are writing fewer actual paper letters and cards. Maybe you, in particular, aren't to blame, but lots of somebodies are. As our times and habits change we always have to address the question: do we try to save the past or let it go?

Bonnie O'Connell and the Friends of the College Book Art Association are trying to save it. They've taken on "A national campaign to save the United States post office by inviting everyone in America to mail any postcard to anyone on the 14th day of every month" and they are launching the project today. They are recommending that you "Find or make a printed, altered, or handmade postcard, address to anyone, attach a 32 cent stamp, drop in a mailbox!" While the actual date you mail it shouldn't matter, the idea of having a monthly—why not weekly?—practice to make and mail a postcard or letter is a good one. A small, manageable project, mail art can be used to sketch out ideas, explore a technique, have fun, finish, and give away.

If you would prefer being on the receiving end, The Rumpus, an online magazine "focused on culture," has recently started a new mail subscription series called "Letters in the Mail." Sign up and pay $5 a month and you will receive a paper letter from an author almost every week. You can write them back but it is unclear if you will receive a personal reply. You can also pay for a year in advance or send a subscription as a gift. Each letter is from a different writer and duplicated for all the subscribers.

These are only two of what I suspect are many more projects to help us get back to letterwriting and postcard sending. In a previous post I mentioned mail art and I sent out some odds and ends via the paper mail. Today in honor of my love for stamped ephemera, I repeat my offer to send you something. If you are one of the first three people to comment and would like to receive a postcard, please also send me an email with your paper mail address.

I went to the post office window to buy first class stamps. "Are they all Forever stamps?"
I asked. The postal worker answered sadly, "Yes, and they're gonna last forever."

The neighborhood dogs are barking in chorus again. Must be the letter carrier…

2012

What I'm Not Reading

2012-02-09T08:18:00.000-08:00

I can read whatever I want to. That may sound strange but after three years of grad school I'm done with my coursework. This is very exciting! But also very daunting. How can I possibly read all the books I've been introduced to? How can anyone?

With Intent to Read

Currently, I've got these checked out of the library: The Printmaker's Daughter: A Novel by Katherine Govier (about Hokusai's daughter), Bleak House (Crime Classics) by Charles Dickens, New and Selected Things Taking Place by May Swenson (poetry), and. And bought these recently: Malaquias Montoyaa new monograph of the artist-activist-professor, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings (California Studies in the History of Art), and Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book (comic and instructional book) by Lynda Barry. That's a lot of books I'm not exactly reading. I know what they are all about, but I'm not sure I'm going to get through them all. Is it cheating to only read part of a book and then try to talk about it?

Sometimes, I pick one up, open it, get the idea, and close it again. Other times I realize that great gems are hidden inside. If I see a glimmer I'll go back and immerse myself in the entire book from the beginning. Like all creative works—including artists' books, film, music, plays, etc.—this particular piece may resonate with me or it may not. The work itself may or may not be ultimately inspiring, but the search should yield interesting results.

A couple months ago I read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. Bayard is a professor of literature in France who is also interested in psychology. He writes that he is a lover of literature, but that he can't possibly read everything he wants to read. He suggests that books are situated in certain places, that you don't need to know exactly what is in them to know what they are about. If you know what they are about you can talk about the ideas within. Bayard has a hilarious classification system that includes: books read, books he's heard of, books he's read and forgotten, and books he's never heard of. If you have forgotten a book is it like never having read it? I have a whole bookshelf of books I've read and vaguely remember. This makes me feel uneasy.

Bayard also makes the point that you may not read an entire book at once (or ever) but you may live with it your whole life as you dip into it from time to time. Perhaps living with a book is more important.

I guess I am relieved that I can also not read whatever I want. I just have to find more books I can live with.

On a somewhat related side note: I finally saw the excellent and passionate 2008 film The Reader with Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross. It is a love story, a thoughtful exploration of moral and social responsibility, and a look at emotional confusion and indecisiveness, with books and reading as the pivot point.

The Reading Room

2012-02-06T11:56:00.000-08:00

The insides of the Berkeley Art Museum gift shop have been moved several feet and are now in the lobby. They are by the ticket takers, surrounded by a fence that says "no bags or backpacks beyond this point." A temporary displacement. The gift shop, the real one, has a new sign that says "The Reading Room," and suggests that you browse the books inside—poetry and experimental fiction—with the understanding that you will bring one back to replace the one you take. "We look forward to seeing how the character of the works on the shelves evolves over the course of the project!…guided and inspired by Ramsay Bell Breslin and Lyn Hejinian."

I enter the old space that seemingly wears the new clothes. The lighting is similar: dim overall, with gooseneck-lamplight on the books that makes the colors glow. The carpet erases my footfalls: I move stealthily around the small room, alone. Two voices recite poetry from hidden speakers. Two modern overstuffed chairs and one swivel chair are the only furniture aside from the full bookshelves that line the walls. With a tilted head, I read every title. There are many repeats.

I recognize names: Lyn Hejinian, Kelsey Street Press, Kate Delos, Dale Going, Rena Rossenwasser, Bill Berkson, and Steve Benson (I first knew him as one of my managers at Pegasus Books, later found out he was a poet. Coincidentally, Pegasus is participating in World Book Night, a giveaway, on April 23. More details are here.) I have so many books at home—what book do I want and what book would I trade for it? I've been trying to rein in my book acquisitions. Then I see the dark gray spine and title Poetical Dictionary (Abridged) by Lohren Green. I know nothing about this book, but I have an inkling and I want to find out if I am right.

This book makes me happy. Each word has a poem below it, composed of real dictionary definitions, the rest made up, artful. I like how these definitions deepen the meaning of the words by their visual examples. Who cannot be delighted by the poem "acrobatics?" An excerpt:

acrobatics—dance on peaks, striking stances…
1. an exercise in what one already knows
about the swing of rings, acting out
a practiced feeling for
just the right degree of composure
there atop the throbbing rope, with
toes gripping twine-rugged texture…

I've seen artist-writers use the dictionary for inspiration before, but not in this poetic form. In the Table of Contents we see that "A" has four entries: acrobatics, affect, affect, atmosphere. It is both bold and humorous having two poems for affect, I think. I'll take it. And I promise to bring one back to replace it. But I'm not going to sit here and read; it feels too much like a waiting room.

The Reading Room project continues through June 17, 2012.

Eco Transfers with Waxed Paper

2012-02-02T08:06:00.000-08:00

In a change from conventional drawing styles, Robert Rauschenberg created transfer drawings in the 1960s. He used turpentine or lighter fluid, newspapers, and a dry pen to make montages of appropriated headlines and disparate images that united in one large picture. He began these drawings in 1958; an exhibit of the works were presented at the Jonathan O'Hara Gallery in New York in 2007. The words and images were always reversed, the hatch marks showed. Sometimes the overinked sections of the soaked newspaper functioned as color blocks. The transfers are ghostly, yet the marks show movement and traces of the hand.

If you like creating narratives with found text or you enjoy making montages with imagery, you might be interested in this waxed-paper transfer technique. It involves only a piece of waxed paper, a fresh newspaper, and a burnisher, such as a bone folder, the handle of a spoon, or the cap of a pen. The beauty of it is that it is non toxic and inexpensive. The results are somewhat ghostly and can be a nice starting point for colored pencil shading or watercoloring tinting. With this technique, the words and images are right reading, not backwards like Rauschenberg's. Black ink works best, but some colors will also transfer.

Locate the image or word you want on a piece of fresh newspaper.
Put the waxed paper over the image/word.
With the burnisher, rub gently, but thoroughly
Peel the waxed paper up.
Position the image on a new piece of good cotton paper or inside a book you've made.
Rub the image or word onto the paper.
Repeat multiple times.
Shade with colored pencils or watercolors, if desired.

If you have a copy of the now out-of-print Unique Handmade Books you can find transfer techniques on page 110.

Not Rauschenberg

Ray Johnson, Mail Art, and Bob Boxes

2012-01-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

The name Ray Johnson tickled the back of my brain as I walked through the Matrix exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum. I overheard the curator say the word, "silhouette" which caused me to back away from the framed collages and see a cupid. The collages were obviously finished pieces, carefully done, apparently worked on over many years. But the title of the show, "Tables of Content: Ray Johnson & Robert Warner Bob Box Archive" suggested that the collages were supplemental to the main event. (You can download the exhibition brochure at that link.)

Thirteen "Bob" boxes were arranged on the wall and meant to be a map, of sorts, to tables in the gallery. The only problem was that the boxes and tables were perpendicular. Where, exactly was "Bob Box #1?" Which end was up? A sign or labels would have been helpful. I moved to the tables, the main focus. On each table were the contents of one of the boxes sent from Ray Johnson to collagist and former optician Robert "Bob" Warner. Warner had arranged the objects: the belts in a box marked "snakes;" empty picture frames; a white cotton glove with writing on it indicating that this was the last we would see of Michael Jackson; tennis balls; a pack of Camel candy cigarettes; bits of clothing; a poster of Olympic gold medalist swimmer Mark Spitz; a few crude drawings; and stacks and stacks of envelopes that revealed certain names, notable names, famous names. Johnson had contacted Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, among others, and many were friends of his. The mail should have been the clue.

Mail art. Ray Johnson is considered to be the father of mail art. He began making art to mail in the 1950s, and in 1962 founded the New York Correspondance School, with incorrect spelling (likely on purpose) to refer to the dance between people rather than the actual mailed art itself. The accompanying brochure refers to the "school," but says little else about this passion. The mail art was often a multiple, sent to many people with the request to alter it and send it on to a specified address or back to him.

Warner, Johnson's friend and recipient of the boxes, gave a brief talk at BAM on Friday, January 27, 2012, which included a performance using what I believe was glue in a squirt bottle and glitter to spell "Ray" on a clean pizza box in reference to an action performed by many boys in the snow and sand. Warner told us, among other things, that the twine around the boxes was tied by Johnson and that Johnson liked wordplay. Upon a celebration of the opening of Warner's eyeglasses store Johnson sent a bouquet of irises. In regards to the performance, Johnson would likely have been pleased and amused at the optician making a spectacle of himself.

An interesting fact I discovered doing later research: Robert Warner is the master letterpress printer for Bowne & Co. Since he is a collagist and a self-described "gatherer" it makes sense to me that he likes to hand set individual pieces of type. Another optician interested in objects and arranging things is the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, whose exhibit is still on view until February 26 at the de Young Museum. Is everything connected?

There was some attempt made to connect this exhibit with the previous Kurt Schwitters exhibit and the show of James Castle's work, but aside from collecting material from everyday life, these three artists approached their art completely differently. If two people are painters are they the same? Schwitters felt he was "painting" with his ephemera: he used it to make formal abstract compositions. James Castle was deaf and it was unknown if he could read; he created his work to communicate perhaps, perhaps to understand the world around him, perhaps because he just loved to make art. Johnson seemed to be throwing out notes in bottles, hoping to connect with individuals, but even more than that, to create ways to make people interact, more like theater or improvisation than visual art.

I was frankly disappointed with the exhibit, but definitely enjoyed unearthing these fascinating facts and stories from the detritus of the tables and later, from the internet.

A far more interesting project that looks at personal effects in containers is currently in progress by photographer Jon Crispin. The photographer was given permission to document the left behind suitcases of people who were admitted to the Willard Psychiatric Center between 1910-1960 (suitcases now belong to the New York State Museum). Of course, the people never left. One post says: "You can see the bird droppings from when it was stored in the attic before they were [sic] saved by the museum." The valises are all wrapped in archival paper and Crispin photographs the wrappers, then unwraps them without knowing what is inside. While these, like the Bob Boxes, were things left behind, they are more mysterious and some are heartbreaking. The objects were important to someone and were repeatedly a part of their lives: I believe this is our way in. We want to either identify with or just connect with the personal.

After stewing about the Johnson/Warner exhibit for a few days, in my head I've created the show I would like to see. The tables are separated as islands, each box included with its contents, some things in the box, some things out and arranged. Maybe not everything is shown. Photographs of various arrangements are on the walls, challenging the viewer to go back and forth between image and reality, two and three dimension, and to hunt for certain objects, which may or may not be visible. That which is hidden often sparks the viewer's curiosity. Perhaps include a large map with pins and flags showing the addresses where Johnson lived and where he sent his mail art, perhaps include photos of the recipients, if known. Then, in the spirit of give-aways, publish a catalogue that includes an artifact or facsimile of one object with every purchase, or perhaps a packet of stationery that encourages alteration and mailing out.

At the very least, the exhibit made me pull out a few bags of collected ephemera and begin sorting by theme, assembling envelopes, and thinking about sending mail art again like I did in the 1980s. So, even a show that did not resonate with me inspired me to make art. I was able to back away and see with fresh eyes. Success? Failure? Who can say?

I've never done this before, and I may not do it again, but I am offering an envelope of oddments to the first three people who reply to this post and desire some mail art…

Finishing a Project: Decide-Commit-Focus

2012-01-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

Maybe you have a box full of unfinished books or stories like I do. What's the deal? Why can we finish some projects and not others? Is it possible to go back? Since self help always comes in numbers, here are three steps for possibly getting the job done.

Decide. Decide which project you are going to finish. Spread out partially done work and take a careful look. One will likely send out a little magnet or tug on your coat. Pick a project, any project. Put the rest away. If you are starting fresh, choose a topic or structure to start with. In "The Cauldrons of de Kooning," the author quotes de Kooning, "In art one idea is as good as another." Ideas that have meaning to you, that is. If you like, you can order a mug with this saying.

Commit. Make it the top priority on the to-do list. Gather your materials, clear a space, and sit down.

Focus. Work on one section. Do you need to write? Edit? Design pages? Create images? Sketch it out, doodle on sticky notes, cover your table with brown paper and scribble. Focus on the one area, but let yourself make preliminary notes and possibly even mistakes on separate materials first.

The main point is that the project has to be able to re-grab us. Something inspired us to begin with and we have to recapture that mood, get in the groove again. It may or may not be comfortable going back there, but sometimes pushing through that discomfort is part of the process and the final outcome can be quite rewarding. We can also decide if we really want to finish or if we should commit to recycling the materials and focus on moving on.

The Cover is Not the Book

2012-01-23T08:28:00.000-08:00

At the College Book Art conference this year, Buzz Spector, book artist, theoretician, and educator and Brewster Kahle, computer engineer, internet entrepeneur, activist, and digital librarian were the guest speakers. Each spoke from a different angle about books and libraries and their uses.

Spector began his keynote address by noting two things: one, that Blurb, the print-on-demand service, had just published its one-millionth book; and two, that you can't physically know how far along you are in the book when you are reading on an e-reader. He was prepared to talk about libraries as the artist's studio and how artists use either their own personal libraries and/or create installations of libraries in gallery settings (and he did), but he noticed that the projections from the laptop on the lectern kept changing during the introductions, which sparked an off-the-cuff preface. We all were distracted and amused, I think, by the "welcome" slide changing to a variety of "no input" signals to "guest user," and he decided to acknowledge it. He began to think, he said, about what happens to a computer screen when you are not touching it. And the connections between computers and books in general.

While Spector acknowledged that print-on-demand is a great way to get books out there, he also felt that all one-million books were now "emulsified." I had to look up the word in this context to see what he might have meant by it; I think he meant separate elements that are mixed together to form one unit. These books were created with the same paper stock and laminated cover, which he said was "a baseline for ordinariness" and created "affectless planes for certain kinds of ideas." On the one hand, I agree that all the books look the same, that if you have seen one you can recognize another from across the room. We like our books to distinguish themselves, somehow. But by dismissing them by cover that means we have totally lost sight of content. And isn't that what a book is for? To give enlighten us, spark us, entertain us, produce some kind of reaction or thought? As it stands, all our mass-market paperbacks are all the same size (although designed differently), and don't you find that one coffee table book has the same aura as another? And there are artist books that look similar to other artist books as well. I'd say McDonald's french fries are more of a "baseline for ordinariness" than the Blurb books—you can get them anywhere. Are the Blurb books really "affectless planes for certain kinds of ideas?" I can't say. I haven't read more than half a dozen. If I've got my numbers right: 999,994 to go…

While our focus when making book art is to have "authorship" over our work, that is, to make all the choices regarding content, paper, typeface, materials, and all of these choices affect how our readers/viewers will experience the art, I don't think we are asking Blurb to make book art. If you look at Spector's work, he stacks up discarded books from libraries or arranges books that he owns. The content almost doesn't matter, although he might say there is much reading experience potential from these arrangements.

Along with computer-generated books comes the huge potential for reading those books on the computer or similar device. Spector said he hasn't touched his Kindle since 2009 when Amazon pulled George Orwell's 1984 due to rights issues, but I do not think he minds. One thing the e-reader did not do for him was let him know how much he had left to read. His thumb would normally get closer and closer to the back cover until he finished the book, but the e-reader gave his thumb no physical indicator. He liked the idea of the thumb "as a marker of time passing." The ultimate digital reading. I like that image, too. I was told recently, however, that there are little dots at the bottom of one of these readers so you can visually see your progress. Is the thumb touching the back cover a small thing or a big one? Is it important? Or just an interesting image?

In October 2011, Blurb announced software and capability to design and produce books for iPad, iPhone, and e-reader. Good, bad, or ugly? Does it matter? Easy access is the key. When I started making books in college I wanted to be able to price my art so that everyone could afford it. Ultimately, I realized that the market was small and I couldn't make a living that way. The writing has always been central to the books I make. For a writer, the wider the reach, the better. Writers don't get to choose the color of their books or the typefaces or the layout. Writers choose the words. Writers want as many readers as possible.

Brewster Kahle spoke about some projects he has been working on that broaden that access. One is a group of mobile libraries to bring books to everyone, particularly to children who do not have access to them. The libraries don't have truckloads of actual books; a van is equipped with printing/binding machines to print out digitized books from the internet. The books cost $1 each to print. Kahle showed a slide of a grinning child receiving a small print-on-demand book from the van. It was the first book the child had ever owned. This project, as well as the One Laptop per Child project, is why we need books available for the screen, why this is important.

Book art is wonderful, no doubt about it. It feeds our need for tactility, for beauty, for personal expression. But what is inside has got to matter. As book artists we can still make use of those print-on-demand services. Keith Smith uses them as a color printer: he designs the books so he can take them apart and rebind them to make his own book art. The cover is not the book.

photo by Mollie

Making a Felt Book, Pt. 5: Binding

2012-01-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

I've tried all kinds of bindings for felted books, but this simple form seems to work the best: three folded pages stitched to a wraparound cover. You will want to try to get the folded pages as close together as possible, but your sewing machine may dictate just how close that is. You can also sew the pieces to the cover by hand. In the photo you can see a pearl-headed pin temporarily marking the center sewing line. Even after it is completely sewn the pages may spring open in this little book. Two pearl-headed pins for closures resolve this issue, now this cactus-themed book is its own pin cushion. For a book that always stays closed try making a book with a landscape or horizontal format.

Cactus Couple, 2012

"Their relationship was prickly soft"

Elizabeth Bishop: Poet & Quiet Artist

2012-01-16T08:06:00.000-08:00

Look on the quiet side, the side in shadows, present, but not yet seen. A writer with an artist's eye may live there. Who knew that the poet Elizabeth Bishop was an admirer of Joseph Cornell's work and made her own art as well? A small article in the New York Times alerted me to a small show at the Tibor De Nagy Gallery in New York that also exhibited some of her possessions, such as her desk from many years spent living in Brazil. The exhibit is called Objects and Apparitions, also the title of a poem by Octavio Paz that Bishop translated, dedicated to Joseph Cornell (169).

The number one hundred is a weird catalyst—as if we are waiting for an excuse to celebrate. And so, here it is, the centenary of Elizabeth Bishop's birth. Known for her writing, Bishop won, among other awards, a Pulitzer prize for a book of poems in 1956 and she taught at Harvard in the 1970s. Bishop's poetry, such as "At the Fishhouses," (50) shows an observant eye and startlingly clear imagery. We might say that she wrote with her artist mind, so it is not too surprising, after all, to find out that she painted. Apparently, the art critic Meyer Schapiro also remarked that she "writes poems with a painter's eye."

The gallery website refers to her artwork and the objects on display as her "private, domestic world," but I wonder if they are just different forms of reference to her travels and the larger world around her. At what point, when the subject matter is public, does the object become intimate? The watercolor and gouache painting Sleeping Figure (#6 of 28 images available for view), is certainly a more intimate subject. The paint is handled with care, the lines have personality. She has paid attention to the woodwork around the window and the stripes on the coverlet. The bed seems to sink in under the figure, giving it weight. Other artworks are: Mérida from the Roof, Red Flowers on Black, Table with Candelabra, Tombstones for Sale, an assemblage in a box called Anjinhas (which, according to the notes in Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose and Letters (Library of America), was "inspired by the high infant mortality rate in Brazil and, in particular, by the drowning of a young girl in Rio," p. 937) and two more small paintings: Tea Service, and County Courthouse. As you may be able to tell from the titles, some are focused closer to home, some look out into the world. All are rendered carefully and with emotion. You can see this same treatment as she writes about the comic book, the begonia, the taboret, and the doily in her poem "The Filling Station" (123). The feelings she stirs in both her writing and her art are unsurprisingly similar. The paintings are like poems, capturing a moment.

Much of her writing is autobiographical, sometimes disguised, sometimes not. I was happy to see that she had translated from the Portuguese one of my favorite short stories, "The Smallest Woman in the World" by Clarice Lispector (302). I also found Bishop's own work equally or more compelling. Bishop's short story "In the Village" (99) is a fascinating and touching account of a young girl, her grieving mother, her maternal relatives, the sounds of a scream and a blacksmith's shop, and which also beautifully paints a picture of a batch of postcards on page 102:

Some are plain, or photographs, but some have lines of metallic crystals on them—how beautiful!—silver, gold, red, green, or all four mixed together, crumbling off, sticking in the lines on my palms. All of the cards like this I spread on the floor to study. The crystals outline the buildings on the cards the way buildings never are outlined but should be—

Bishop's father died eight months after she was born. Her mother entered a mental hospital four years later and little Elizabeth was mostly raised by her maternal family. Perhaps you could say her work (although perhaps not her life) incorporated and transcended these early traumas. She died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm in 1979.

A 48-page hardbound catalogue from the gallery is forthcoming. Exchanging Hats: Paintings is a previously published book containing forty of her works. The book shares the title with a poem about roles and gender, which begins with "unfunny uncles" trying on women's hats and ends with aunts in shadow as "we wonder / what slow changes they see under / their vast, shady, turned-down brim" (198).

The gallery website features a wistful quote that she wishes she had been a painter. It seems that she was, she just didn't use the label.

Making a Felt Book, Pt. 4: Needlefelting Details

2012-01-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

Wet felting gives quick swirls of color and shows movement. You can needlefelt details, either images or words, with some wool yarn and a special, barbed needle. The needle and most of the feltmaking supplies are available by mail order from Black Sheep Designs and from Blue Goose Glen. Try 4-ply tapestry wool yarn and pull the strands apart to needlefelt words. For adding large, new areas of color to your pages you will need wool roving or wool scraps and a tool that holds multiple needles such as the Clover Needlefelting Tool (4 needles) or the Pine Needlefelting Tool (3 or 6 needles). Watch for a demo with the needlefelting tool in a future post.

Tools: special needle for needlefelting; thick foam (such as high-density foam for chair pads) to put under your project; extra sharp pointed scissors
Materials: wool yarn (DMC tapestry wool is good); felted pages; wool roving (for larger blocks and shapes of color)

The needle, with its many barbs, is extremely sharp, so please be careful. Use an up and down motion all over the area of wool you want to attach. On the back of each page you will see the little tufts where you have pushed the wool through, and you will have a choice to leave it, trim it with a scissors, or use a disposable razor to shave it. For my cactus theme it seemed appropriate to leave it.

Next up: Binding the Book

Making a Felt Book, Pt. 3: Finding the Forms

2012-01-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

The blank pages are ready to be transformed. The mix of green makes it looks like the theme might be camouflage, but I'm going with cacti. I've been carrying the pages around with me and studying them, looking for forms, shapes, whatever emerges: two people in one, a cactus garden in another. I'd like to think of a place I want to start and where I'd like to end, otherwise this book will most likely just end up random. Sometimes I can trust the process to resolve itself intuitively, but I'm not feeling confident about this today. I think the title will be Cactus Couple and I have an idea for a short text of one line. I'm going to machine stitch the outlines of the images first, though, like quilting. I have a feeling I'm abandoning my start and end ideas and seeing where the images take me, after all. This sewing step, the finding of the forms, is optional, but it helps me get going.

Tools: sewing machine with a walking presser foot (you can see one below and here); sharp pointy scissors; spool of all-purpose thread and a bobbin of thread (these can be different colors for an interesting effect). Sulky makes an interesting multicolored thread.

The walking presser foot makes it easier to sew into the felt. Even so, you will still need to leave the needle down and unclamp the foot, swivel the fabric, then clamp the foot again to turn tight corners or to change directions.

Regarding the thread ends: I try to sew all my outlines with a single line, which means I only have two places with loose threads: beginning and end, or point A and point B. You may leave long thread ends or cut them short. The sewing generally stays in place whether you tie knots at the ends or not. You will see a thread from the needle on one side of the fabric and a thread from the bobbin on the other side. You can pull both threads to one side of the fabric by pulling on one thread until you see the loop pop up from the other, then coaxing the loop through and straightening out that second thread. Tie off the pair of threads in a square knot.

Next up: Needlefelting the Details

Saving Trees, Altered Reading, and Intermedia

2012-01-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

If a tree falls online and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? I imagine someone has posted a tree, perhaps a video of a tree, somewhere, but I can't recall having seen one. So, I suppose it does not make noise for me, but I haven't walked that way, yet, plus I usually keep my computer mute.

Just as we wonder who will see and experience the handmade books in our libraries and galleries,we may wonder who will see and interact with the book art hidden in the forest on the web. In a talk given by Alexander Mouton, Assistant Professor of Digital Art & Design, Seattle University at the College Book Art Association Conference on January 6, 2012, Mouton showed several exciting digital works that had the qualities of bookworks. This is Not A Poem by Alan Bigelow absolutely captivated me. The website describes the piece as a "toy, a game, and a language engine." Bigelow starts with a poem with which we are familiar "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree" by Joyce Kilmer. It is set in a circle, which begins to spin like a record. Instead of describing it further, I would recommend taking a look, or rather, a play. The only hint I will give is to mouse both around and through the poem. It may not be a poem anymore in the conventional sense, but Mouton suggested that it is a digital book. No trees were harmed in the making of it.

It has notable booklike characteristics:

Several pieces work together to create a work larger and more interesting than the pieces on their own.
It is interactive.
Although it can be read more than one way, the artist's intent is clear.
It has several conceptual layers: it is not a poem or a tree, but something altogether new; the reader's actions add to the concept (slashing? slicing?); it has a surprise or twist.
It changes over time, but only if the reader chooses to engage with it.
It has sound and movement.

With the exception of sound, it sounds like a book to me. It has the potential to reach a very wide audience, but only if readers know where to find it. A second interactive story of Bigelow's that I found equally compelling while exploring his website was The Quick Brown Fox: A Pangram. Another bookwork Mouton showed is called Life Is Like Water by Peter Horvath, but I was unable to access it at home. Horvath makes use of the pop-up window and the titling becomes the text: familiar visual computer language transformed into art or electronic literature. I suppose I do not really care what it is called, I am interested in what it does.

I would still like to have a tactile component available with these web pieces, much the way the musicians Jónsi & Alex made a little book Riceboy Sleeps to accompany their music and video (available now as a pdf download only). Their book alone is mysterious and interesting, rich with allusions to childhood memories and dreams, familiar textures, pencil lines, crumpled paper and lace. It contains no text, only a card at the end with a website. The original website is gone, sadly—I say sadly because it, too, was satisfying on its own. Something exciting occurred when you went back to look at the book after seeing the little videos (All the Big Trees and Daníell in the Sea): by having listened to the music and having read some of the text you overlaid your new knowledge on the object. Adding the memories of the new pictures and music, the little book changed dynamically: pictures moved, sounds occurred but only in your mind.

The fact that half of this initial experience doesn't exist anymore brings up the problem of archivability. Similarly, any works built in Flash cannot be seen on the current technology, the iPad. On the archival scale, the physical object still wins. The interaction between object and online fascinates me and I hope to be able to have more of this type of experience in the future, but perhaps continued technological research must be done first so that the art won't vanish.

In addition to the issue of longevity, I realized that the problem with many interactive sites (and even books presented as games) is that if the reader has to be instructed s/he may not want to bother. What is the payoff? It had better be really good. I am glad that neither the book nor the website, like the Bigelow site, had many directions. I know that I want to be immersed immediately in the artwork, that I don't have much patience for the preface. The work should be both clear, but invite curiosity. The reader wants to feel that s/he has uncovered a secret, that maybe s/he is the first to notice a detail or how something works, rather than be told what to do or how to do it. User interface is the key to success here, like any other interactive project. The reader wants to be invited into a party where the party is happening but not told exactly what to wear, what to eat and to whom to talk.

That tree? I'm thinking about a webcam now, trained on a tree; I'm searching for it, but I'm not finding it. Maybe it is gone. Maybe it was never there. So many trees, so many videos, so many websites. So much art to read. So many pebbles, petals, leaves out in the physical world we don't see or hear, and they are certainly there. Someone—if only an ant or a bee—is listening.

tree at the Albany Bulb, 2007

Making a Felt Book, Pt. 2: Cutting to Size

2012-01-06T07:05:00.000-08:00

To begin making a piece of felt into a book it is useful to cut the pages and cover to size. Perhaps all my years of cutting off the deckle edges for letterpress printing have influenced my aesthetic: I like to cut the edges off of the handmade felt as well, but it is not necessary. Watch fingers! Keep fingers behind ruler! Trim, then divide the long piece of felt into four equal pieces. You will then trim three of the folded pages down to fit inside the wraparound cover as shown.

Tools: Large self-healing cutting mat; rotary cutting knife; metal ruler that is longer than your wool felted fabric
Material: 17" x 9" (43 cm x 23 cm) wool felted fabric
Example: A bookblock with three folded pages and a wraparound cover, 4" x 4 1/2" x 2" thick (102 cm x 114 mm x 51 mm)

Next up: Finding the Forms with a Sewing Machine

Making a Felt Book, Pt. 1: Wet Felting

2012-01-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

Felted books are thick and squishy, with a set of characteristics quite different from paper books. I learned the wet-felting technique in 2003 from my sister-in-law who suggested that I make felted books, which otherwise never would have occurred to me. I thank her. It is fun to play with color in soap and warm water. New Zealand Romney is coarse but wet-felts well, and Merino wool is finer and seems to work better for needle felting. You can mix the Romney and Merino in wet felting. A good book is Feltmaking: Fabulous Wearables, Jewelry, and Home Accents by Chad Alice Hagen. Not much room for text in felted books, however, so these are good to make when you have some kind of concept and some colors you'd like to work with. I'm thinking about cacti. This is a multi-part project.

Tools: vinyl tablecloth to cover work surface; 2-3 layers of cloth towels; 21 3/4" x 12" (55 cm x 30 cm) piece of ridged plastic dish liner used for kitchen shelves; two sushi mats; Ivory Snow soap powder (other detergents will not work); large plastic container; access to hot water
Materials: at least one ounce of wool roving; wool yarn, wool scraps, pieces of wool sweater (optional)
Example: 17" x 9" (43 cm x 23 cm) wool felted fabric

The New Zealand Romney is the darker green, the Merino wool is the longer, olive green piece. I order wool roving from Black Sheep Designs and Blue Goose Glen.

Most of your time will be spent rolling up the soapy wet wool in the sushi mats and pressing on it, unrolling it, then rolling it in the opposite direction and doing this again. Allow an hour or two. Eventually, you will be able to feel when the felt is hardening and shrinking: at that point you can work vigorously, and this will shorten your time.

Use finger-sized pieces
and place them on the plastic

Overlap them like shingles
or fish scales

Continue to add
overlapping rows

Cover the plastic with
these loose rows

Start a layer of
perpendicular rows

Make a second layer
this direction

Make a third layer in the opposite direction

Pour on hot, soapy water

Press down gently

Press until uniformly wet

Once it holds together, roll up in sushi mats

Press gently several minutes

Gently wring out extra water

Arrange in opposite direction

Press and roll gently
(Repeat rolling and unrolling)

Pinch to check fibers
These are loose

Once fibers stop shifting
rub in circular motion

Pinch to check fibers again
These are tight

Crumple into a ball
and scrub on the plastic

Rinse well in hot water
Do last rinse in cold

Rinse plastic
Roll up in mat to flatten out

Press briefly

Let dry on towels

If you are interested, some of my earliest felted books are here, some more recent ones here.

Next up: Cutting the pages to size

Sometimes There Is No Subtext

2012-01-02T08:09:00.000-08:00

She pushed back the curtains to find the sun rising over the Berkeley hills in the fog.

A History of a Life in a List

2011-12-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

A friend gave me a formidable and bright book this season called, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, which I am flipping through slowly, starting with "Early Writing Tablet," depicting the rationing of beer (90), jumping to "Admonitions Scroll" (248), "Mexican Codex Map" (545) and distracted by "Pieces of Eight" (516). The "Admonitions Scroll," if you were wondering, contains a parody of instruction for acceptable behavior for Chinese court ladies (the "imperial harem"); it is eleven feet long and was painted somewhere between 500-800 AD. Wait. Those three hundred years make an individual's life look like nothing more than a brushstroke, if that.

Like the premise of the book I just mentioned, articles in newspapers and magazines around this time of year (printed on rustling paper or found somewhere on your screen) tend toward the structure of lists. The year ends, and suddenly we have lists of what we liked about it. Or hated, thought was humorous, lame, delicious, etc. Maybe something two years ago was better, but no matter. A-listing we will go. We can list a history of a year in so many different ways: movies, books, music, games, wars, cities occupied, bank statements, receipts, tickets, emails, failed candidates, candy eaten… (I just learned that "stressed" backwards is "desserts." Not good.) These year-end lists are filled with hope, truly! They acknowledge that we had a list last year and that a list will undoubtedly show up again, albeit in different clothes, on the doorstep of next year as well.

A History of a Life in a List. How about the life list as an approach to making a book? A whole autobiography or collective biography through a theme such as: magazines read at different ages; kinds of cookies baked each year; favorite objects over time. What grabs us, what has kept grabbing at us as we've gotten older? Our taste and what is important to us changes over time, and we can learn by looking. In Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs*, he talks about many of his childhood passions like comic book heroes, some of which he still acknowledges, others he has let go. Ray Bradbury in his book Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You ** writes of an interesting way of making lists; you add "the" to a memory and create a series of nouns or titles. Some items in his list are "The Ravine," "The Fog Horn" and "The Mirror Maze" (17). The little word "the" can have so much importance and can spark so many ideas. Using a list to organize a set of stories isn't new: Primo Levi used chemical elements as chapter titles and starting points in his book, The Periodic Table.*** From this choice the reader understands Levi's life and passion.

Continuing to flip through the 100 Objects book, I'm finding a magnificent calligraphic work dated 1520-1566 from Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey (458), and a German woodcut by Dürer of a rhinoceros (482) from 1515. In three hundred or five hundred years none of today's material may matter; on the other hand, it may end up in another museum director's book, and our lives may reveal themselves to be some really nice brushsrokes. The books we make now may take us into the future.

Wishing you optimism in 2012.

The above photo was taken in downtown Los Angeles, California of public art: Wishing Bells by Sook Jin Jo.

*a misleading title, I think: part of his definition of an amateur is a "lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to…explore the imaginary world—oneself" (294) , not a half-baked person or brushstroke of a person at all; this book was funny and moving and gave me some insight into the writer
**a ridiculous title, another excellent book
***a good title, another excellent book

Cumulative Effect in Art and Books

2011-12-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

After reading the play "At the Vanishing Point" by Naomi Iizuka I discovered that not only was I learning about characters cumulatively through overlapping monologues, but I was learning about the photographer and optician Ralph Eugene Meatyard of Lexington, Kentucky, who inspired the play. Coincidentally, his work is currently on exhibit at San Francisco's deYoung Museum. So I went to see it.

The high, white walls are lined with sixty photographs at face height, black and white, mostly from the 1960s and taken of Meatyard's family. Ah, family portraits, you say, but with a twist: the children and their mother occasionally wear masks and are posed with dolls. Occasionally, only the masks or only the dolls are in the photos. The settings are seemingly abandoned buildings, his backyard, other wildernesses, other structures like stairs or bridges. All of the photos were staged. What struck me most was not one singular shot here or there (here's one that particularly caught my attention) but the cumulative effect of the photographs: the strength of the work based on all of the parts together. I've modified the medical term for relevance:

cumulative effect n. the state at which repeated [viewing]…may produce effects that are more pronounced than those produced by the first [view]…Also called cumulative action.

My first impression of Meatyard's work: creepy. But since I come to see it all, I continued to look. Next, I decided that some of the staged pictures were irritating, too contrived, arranged just so, sometimes on a grid; I wanted to see a doll that had fallen over or was partly out of the frame. Then, a few of the oversized masks on the children began to haunt me: old people's heads on young people, premature aging? a look into the future? I became interested in a series of photos of one of his sons, taken at different times and wearing different masks, but always by the same wall: facets of one person, perhaps. By this time it was clear that Meatyard had a finite number of masks, a finite number of kids (3) and also tended to use the same objects over and over in different configurations and settings. I found myself drawn to the photos with nearly hidden people: I had to look twice to see the figures in the shadows. By the last photo I felt I understood his eye for juxtapositions, his interest in the uncanny: familiar, yet strange.

In addition to viewing a body of work, multiple viewings of one image or a repeated reading of one book can also have this cumulative effect. Multiple layers and various components may make the story understandable from various angles and on different levels; the meaning just gets deeper.

A museum is a familiar setting but can hold strange things. A museum is also a stage, as is a book, as is a box. All can house related—but possibly disparate—scenes, texts, and objects that all point to one story, mood, or idea. Not random (An Artist's Book is Not a Taco), but carefully selected and staged to lead the way down a particular path: to produce that cumulative effect, a relationship between the parts. The Meatyard exhibit did just this and I imagine the exhibition catalogue would do the same.

The Meatyard exhibit at the deYoung runs through February 26, 2012. Other photos, not in the show, may be seen here.

Distance, 2010

photo by Sibila Savage

Read Any Good Books Lately?

2011-12-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

I eagerly open the books of fiction writers of current acclaim and sometimes find myself disappointed. These books have received awards, glowing reviews, the authors have been interviewed in places I admire, but the works themselves perplex me. They just don't get me excited either to read or to write; and inspiration to do either or both is what I expect from a book. Sometimes they downright turn me off. I don't like to dismiss books casually and I appreciate the vision, time, and impulse to write, so I decided to investigate why a book might hit me one way and not another.

Most recently, I decided that the qualities I'm looking for: a connection to why humans do what we do, refreshing language, rhythmical sentences, understated humor, a magical quality that speaks to one's subconscious mind, and a little tug at my heart or soul are not always what the awards are about. Inventiveness, cleverness, a novelty in the structure, and obvious wit (sometimes self-satisfied) catch some people's attention but not mine. Here are three writers whose works ricochet back to me, writers I keep trying to read with only partial success. Chabon and Egan, for the following examples, are Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction (2001, 2011, respectively), Lethem is a MacArthur fellow (2005).

I've tried Michael Chabon. So many people I know love his work. He is a talented writer, granted, but the books are too over-the-top for me. I lose sight of the story amongst the ornamentation of the quirks and the presence of the writer, although I was able to read much of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and enjoy it. But one 2009 article that he wrote in the New York Review of Books called, "Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood" touched me and got to the core of what I'm looking for. It is about our landscapes and how children don't get to play outside and explore the world by themselves anymore and that by being deprived of this, their imagination and the possible future of art may be affected. The prose is elegant, effortless, magical, with no arrows pointing to craft. Perhaps I just prefer his personal essays and should try his book Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son.

I heard Jennifer Egan on the radio. She was a wonderful speaker: smart, thoughtful, articulate, curious, someone whose work I was eager to read. If you look up a picture of her you'll see that she is also good-looking. But the books let me down. I couldn't read past a few pages. The human interactions didn't feel right, the characters didn't speak to me. The inventiveness of A Visit from the Goon Squad is admirable. The concept is very clever. The story just doesn't interest me enough. I am surprised by her high intellectual concepts in light of how she describes her process. In an interview she says she writes fiction by hand "to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be." Consciously getting to the unconscious (I would say "subconscious") part is an extremely helpful, useful task for a writer. But I am looking for more than good ideas; I am looking for a magical connection.

Jonathan Lethem is an interesting mix. His earlier books are self-consciously about craft. He handles each sentence with polish, stringing together a perfect necklace of words per book. But then, with Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, the prose relaxes, soars: the magical quality appears. I came across an interview where he says, "A lot of people are led, understandably, to thinking of Fortress as a break to what preceded it. In my view, it's the opposite" partly because it has an "extensive commitment to mimetic tricks." Is he saying he crafted all the dreamlike qualities, that he consciously had control over all the magic? With tricks? I am dubious. I believe that a writer shapes the material, sometimes during, sometimes after, but I don't believe it can be crafted perfectly from the start without losing its liveliness. (I did read and like those two books, so perhaps it doesn't matter what he says about them.) I hunted further. Closer to the magic in a second interview, he says "And it's that game of not knowing what you're doing that, for me, is where the real energy comes from." That also sounds closer to the truth to me.

Perhaps it is that "not knowing" that I want to be part of. As a reader I don't want to be shut out of the mystery and be controlled; I want to go on the exploration with the author, be part of the process, get a chance to infer, imply, imagine, and read between the lines. And I want to trust that the author will show me something new, or help me to discover something I didn't know I knew already.

spread from A Death in the Family by James Agee

Among the Pulitzer Prize winners that I have read, these books moved me (prize date in parenthesis):

James Agee. A Death in the Family. An inventive, but not flashy work (see the only page, above, that visually describes a car from 1918 starting up and driving away). A book that seemed heartfelt, captured love, childhood, warm humor, family dynamics, and drew tears. (Awarded the prize in 1958, posthumously)
Elizabeth Strout. Olive Kittredge. Interconnected short stories set in Maine that get to the heart of the characters. (2009)
Annie Prouix. The Shipping News. (1994)
Toni Morrison. Beloved. (1988)
Alice Walker. The Color Purple. (1983)
John Cheever. The Stories of John Cheever. (1979)
Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird. (1961)

And some of the finalists.

Marilynne Robinson. Housekeeping. (1982) Haunting book. Beautiful metaphorical prose.
Tim O'Brien. The Things They Carried. (1991) Powerful structure. (Although I have only read excerpts.)
Grace Paley. The Collected Stories. (1995) Humorous, strong, and honest.
Louise Erdrich. (2009) Beautiful prose, powerful, riveting, brutal when she needs to be.

B. Wurtz: Drawing with Found Materials

2011-12-16T08:15:00.000-08:00

Looking at the field of assemblage and collage, we may notice that the art of B. Wurtz stands out in a good way, away from the sepia-inspired tones and into the colorful imagination. In an interview, Wurtz says the pieces he makes (William < Bill < B) feel to him more like drawings. Working primarily with wood, wire, plastic shopping bags, mesh vegetable bags, and a variety of other everyday, yet seemingly invisible objects, Wurtz puts together sculptures and hanging pieces that are humorous and transformative. He also, I think, shows an appreciation for humans as industrial designers, makers of the tin can, the door latch, and the hose nozzle, among others. His content concerns, if we must list them, are: food, clothing, shelter, and beauty.

The body of work looks streamlined, contained, and unified partly because his palette is limited. In this case, his palette holds not specific paint colors, but specific objects. The wood he uses and builds with is mostly clean and new, with a prominent grain. The objects are either new or have been cleaned: the former layers of meaning stripped off. Instead of using the objects to refer to their earlier owners, past lives, or usual uses Wurtz chooses the objects to highlight formal concerns like pattern, color, shape, and texture. It is as if he has taken a microscope to their formal elements. In the interview, he describes a piece he calls "Monument" and his interests in "the grain of the wood, the lines of the can, the pattern on the sock," and, of course, how they look when placed next to one another. In this era where the weathered look is popular, particularly with found objects, Wurtz disregards the pre-patinated surface. It is not the surface treatment but the treatment of the object that interests him. When a flattened plastic bag starts looking like a tank top we are genuinely surprised. (For a bookmaking project we might use materials that blend seamlessly with our concept and project, but that are, at second glance, something quite unexpected. It is interesting to think that our eyes play tricks, that our memory might be wrong.)

The humor shows gently, for example, in a tabletop piece of a wooden base with two upright wires and a translucent white plastic bag suspended between the wires like a beard. Another piece is a hula hoop that appears to be circling around a dowel. The positioning in the gallery is part of a third work: a little green "fence" encircles bright green objects mounted on blocks as well as the brass plate that covers the electrical outlets embedded in the concrete floor. Where the objects are in space and what else is nearby are also important. (In bookmaking we might translate this concept to the layout—the placement of words and images on the page—as well as rhythm and sequence: what came before and what comes after and the relationship between them.)

You can see a tour of a recent exhibition here. In that video, note the child being pushed in a stroller who grins and reaches out for a tree of puffy, plastic bag foliage. The child, who not a sculpture, captures our own feelings about Wurtz's work, those of curiosity and delight in the world around us.

not B. Wurtz: photo of found objects, Berkeley, 2011

Brief bio: He was born in 1948 in Pasadena, CA. He holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, 1980. He currently lives in New York City. In 2006, B. Wurtz created a photographic artist book called Blocks, edition of 250.

A Simple Pop-Up Accordion Card

2011-12-12T14:00:00.000-08:00

Wandering around the fine arts building at San Francisco State University, I discovered a glass case with previous exhibition catalogues inside. A folded one caught my eye. It was for a 2004 show called "2 1/2: Art at the Corner of Two and Three Dimensions." The concept for the design fit perfectly, the card was simple, yet felt animated. It looked like it would make a nice card for other events as well, although without the terrific conceptual connection. So, let's make one.

Materials: Use a paper that is 8 1/2" x 11" or A4 (either: cut in half, lengthwise). For digital design, plan to print two cards on one piece of cardstock (each approximately 4 1/4" x 11," or 105 mm x 297 mm for A4). Note: Plan your design so you can trim to 3 3/8" x 10." Many printers will not print to the edges and this will ensure the pictures will bleed off the edges: top, bottom, and sides, like the example.
Tools: pencil, bone folder, art knife and metal ruler and cutting mat, academic divider (optional, for creating five equal sections)
Example: The steps shown below create a five-panel card that is 3 3/8" x 2" (79 mm x 51 mm) when all folded up or 3 3/8" x 10" (79 mm x 254 mm) completely open.

Arrange the paper horizontally.

Divide and mark paper into five equal sections along the long side, top and bottom (that will be four marks).

Drawing down with the bone folder against the ruler, press into the paper to make a score that connects each set of top and bottom marks.

Start with a valley fold. Then fold the next section back on itself; continue alternating valleys and mountains along the scores.

Mark and make one horizontal slit (approximately 2" or 50 mm, centered across the fold): one across the first mountain fold (#2 of 5 folds), one across the second valley fold (#3/5). Note: if you change the scale, the slits should be the width of one of the panels.

Mark 1" or 25 mm on either side of the folds and at the edge of the paper. Make two scores with the bone folder, connecting the ends of the cut slit to the marks at the edge of the paper. Repeat for the second cut section.

Fold along the new scores: mountain folds for the first section, valley folds for the second section.

Refold the center of the first section so that where it was once a mountain fold, now it is a valley fold.

Refold the center of the second section so that where it was once a valley fold, now it is a mountain fold.

Fold up the card, slip it into an envelope, put a stamp on it, and mail it.

Meditation on Creativity

2011-12-08T07:59:00.000-08:00

Finding the flow—
Getting into the groove, the zone—
that spring of creativity;
you just have to tap into it.

Creative sources hide in the body—
between sleeping and waking,
self-hypnosis, meditation,
the eye of the emotional storm.
How do you get there?

It is not a forced path, but a focused one.

From the chair where you sit or the road where you walk:
Be aware of the edges of your body—
The distance between the tip of your finger
and the paper; your shoulder
and the shoulder of another person in the room—
The distance between your cheek
and the light source: the lamp or sun: within or without.

Feel your edges—
Listen to your breaths—
Inhabit your body.

A pleasant sensation, vibration, a calming warming and cooling, a moving—
What surfaces? Light it up—
claim it and carry it—
Dive down, dive down deeply,
and let the
voices / images / notes / colors / words
roll through you and out
past the edges
and beyond.

Invisible Art

2011-12-05T08:53:00.000-08:00

I met a student who I would say is happy to be alive; she finds art everywhere: she elevates scuffs and touch-up paint on buildings to drawings, and debris to assemblage. Only slightly am I exaggerating for effect, but the impulse is true. And as artists, I believe we all experience this extraordinary eye, if not constantly, then close enough. Our visions and creations can make us happy, even ecstatic at times.

What is this impulse? A desire, or perhaps a compulsion to see deeply: not only to see but to perceive and to understand beauty. Someone came into my studio and saw the vinyl tablecloths I use to protect my work surfaces: the cloths are covered with streaks, smears, blotches, and swaths of acrylic ink. "You should cut those up and frame them or use them for book covers!" he said. I shrugged at the time, but I understand what he saw. Because my studio and my ink-covered tablecloths are familiar to me, they are ordinary. But to fresh eyes, they were fresh art.

This kind of heightened vision comes to light in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as a fictional Marco Polo tells a fictional Kublai Khan about his travels to various cities, really all the same, really all Venice. Yet as he describes the city from different angles, dreamlike and fantastic (with allusions to Dante's Inferno), we can't be sure each is not a different city. I think we can apply these ways of living to how we might want to perceive art in daily life.

There are two ways to escape suffering…The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space (165).

We want to seek out art and make it endure. On which level, or part of the continuum shall it exist? How shall we spotlight the ordinary and make it extraordinary? Do we just hold it up for show-and-tell or do we transform it? If we transform it, how much work do we do? We can find an object and put it on a pedestal, give it space just as it is, because it delights us. We can put it in a frame or alter it slightly. We can use it alongside other materials and/or completely transform it. The most obvious examples come from found objects: the painted tablecloth may appear beautiful as is. I could cut out a square piece and frame it; here, I have done no real work except metaphorically to shine a light on it. I could use it as a book cover; in this case my work is to choose its new form and perhaps add content. A third layer might involve cutting it into pieces and stitching it together again like a quilt; my work then would involve the light, the choice, the form, and a complete transformation.

Or we can step back completely and take a photograph. And then the photograph itself becomes the art—the object transient, no longer needed. The picture forever there, to disturb or to delight, making the invisible visible.

An Altered Book: (S)tree(t) of C(roc)od(il)es

2011-12-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

Interestingly, it took a well known fiction writer to get an altered book published and available to a wide audience. Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated, among other works, took an English language copy of the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and, as the copyright page notes, "cut into the pages, carving out a new story." The original was Safran Foer's favorite story. The new version is called Tree of Codes.

My first question was: will it really read like a story, or is this a novelty item? When I picked up the thick paperback book I discovered that it was light, spongy, already a curiosity. Upon opening it I was delighted by the layers of words. Then I began to read, page-by-page. I found repetition of words and some wonderful poetic language left intact, for example, "like the glove from which a hand had been withdrawn" (14). The text in its cutout form tells an abstract story, which is grammatically correct and has complete sentences with "Father" and "Mother" and "I" as the characters. The intrigue lies in the words that float to the surface and play hide and seek with one another. Phrases from below add color, like the past influencing the present.
Although Tree of Codes isn't completely satisfying as stand-alone fiction (which it isn't meant to be anyway), it is magical in conjunction with the tactility and playfulness of the reading experience. The book as a whole is satisfying. Now, I would like to read The Street of Crocodiles. I suspect it is magical because of the language.

Here is what the book and the author look like:

Here is how the book was made using die-cuts:

Bruno Schulz was an artist (and art teacher by profession) as well as a writer which may account for the strong imagery in his written work. You can see his artwork here.

"I was happy," said my father, "to see that unexpected flowering which filled the air with a soft rustle, a gentle murmur, falling like colored confetti through the thin rods of the twigs.

"I could see the trembling of the air, the fermentation of too rich an atmosphere which provoked that precocious blossoming, luxuriation, and wilting of the fantastic oleanders which had filled the room with a rare, lazy snowstorm of large pink clusters of flowers.

"Before nightfall," concluded my father, "there was no trace left of that splendid flowering. The whole elusive sight was a fata morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life."

The Street of Crocodiles (68)

Tree of Codes (60)

Tree of Codes is published by Visual Editions, 2010
"At times I felt that I was making a gravestone rubbing of The Street of Crocodiles, and at times that I was transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had" —Jonathan Safran Foer (139).

Flash Fiction

2011-11-28T20:49:00.000-08:00

I told someone I just had a piece of flash fiction published in a local magazine and he seemed puzzled. "Flash fiction?" I offered, "Short-short story? Sudden fiction? Mine is 449 words; flash is usually under 500 words." He still hadn't heard of it. I said if you go to nanofiction.org you can find hundreds of examples, and those are all under 300 words. It is possible that the term originated from the 1992 book, Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, an anthology of stories under 750 words, those that fit on a two-page spread.

While I do not think it can be defined and boxed to everyone's satisfaction, flash does have some recurring characteristics. It packs details and action and story and character into one distilled package. Sometimes it's a meditation. Something large or very small can happen. It often has a twist or a turn at the end, perfect for bookmaking. The language can be rich, almost chewy. Lydia Davis is an author I admire who writes very short pieces that could be called flash.

Whatever it is or isn't, here my story "Tati's Necklace" in its online incarnation. If you live in the East Bay and an actual paper copy appears on your doorstep, you can find it on page 11 of the December issue of The Monthly.

The Frame, the Crop, and the Composition

2011-11-23T12:10:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling this week, and if you were to look at my first couple of photos you might think I was unable to go outside because I took them all through windows. I could make a whole book of pictures taken through windows that might build into a sad, poignant, fearful, or cozy story, depending upon the frame I use. You might not know I was traveling at all. How the pictures were taken is important: the conditions are telling my story. A different story unfolds if the pictures are taken only in a hospital, or three feet up from the ground, or interiors of just one house. These kinds of conditions tell you who a person is and how s/he sees, even though the person is not actually in the picture. The bookmaker also chooses the frame in which to see the story: using a personal condition as the starting point is an interesting way to begin a book.

Another kind of story comes from pictures that are cropped. Maybe we see a piece of a background, or an arm of another person. We are constantly looking around at the world and deciding to remember only some of it. What makes the cropping of a picture different from our memories? It may be obvious that what you take pictures of and what you make books about tell something about you, but the groupings of pictures can tell different truths and different stories, depending upon what you allow in and what you leave out. But whose arm was that? Another story.

The crop can be intimate. We are face to face with the subject. On the airplane I did not take any pictures, but I watched a man put a shopping bag in the overhead compartment, some greenery poking out. First, I was interested in the plant; was it a potted plant or a pineapple? I metaphorically zoomed all the way in thinking about this one object. I pulled back out as I noticed a flight attendant slipping down the aisle to help. I watched her face, but she did not look like this was an unusual occurrence. What else had people tried to close into that compartment? Panning all the way out I watched the man beaming at her as she turned the bag sideways and clicked the latch. And back at my seat, someone said, "If a member of my family tried to take a plant on an airplane, I'd yell." Four levels of story from near to far: the plant itself; the flight attendant and the man; the whole scene, completed; and the view from a distance. How close will you crop? How close will your narrative go? It depends on which part of the story interests you. You get to choose.

In formal terms, we also have the composition to work with. This is the most intuitive, I think. We can play with color, shape, line, depth, foreground, background, juxtaposition, and the list continues: our choices are many. For bookmaking we can choose to use images that all have the color green; that have curved shapes; that incorporate some kind of marks; that are landscapes; that are such micro images that we can't tell what they are, and on and on.

So many ways to shape a book, so many ways to create a visual narrative. We can create a new truth depending on how and what we like to sort, the frame we look through, and what level of story interests us.

National Museum of the American Indian

Raging Characters

2011-11-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

Who are the raging characters? The man who has arrived home late and drunk. The driver who goes through the stop sign and shouts at the pedestrian to watch where she's going. The student who leaves the door unlocked and then discovers her necklace is missing. The key to their rage, and why they are furious, not merely irritated, mad, or angry, is that they have each done something wrong and they know it. And often, they swear about it.

Language has always been connected with this rage. Often, very cruel language. What we used to call "foul" language, we could now just call foolish language. George Carlin's 1972 comedy routine Seven Dirty Words You Can Never Say on Television (yes, he is performing them at that link) is still funny, but the tameness of the words themselves is almost quaint today. Still, people are offended by some or all of these words.

The words are commonly used in magazines, on later night television, and flame online across the web. If someone complains and says that using these words is "unprofessional," say, in a conference presentation, the comeback may be "well, then you are not my audience." It's a defense. It must be your fault that you are offended, and if you are, go away and don't criticize my manners. Oh, wait. What was that? That last part was unspoken. If you tell someone not to use certain language they may feel you have criticized them. In this case, whether or not they know consciously that they are wrong, the rage rears up and you get a splattering mess of language all over you. The language has power partly because of the rage that accompanies it, partly because we continue to allow it to have that power.

But using the seven dirty words in a professional talk?
Would you show up for a professional conference in a bikini? Okay, I know.
It depends on the conference. Context, my dear, context.

Veering in a slightly different direction, but related: a friend just recommended I listen to Nikky Finney's acceptance speech (min: 16-22) for the 2011 National Book Awards for her book of poetry called Head Off & Split (something the fish seller said). On my way to finding the video I ran into a critical article that contained a quote that sounded a bit angry and as bitter as those opposed to affirmative action. But the U.S. can't run from the miserable, embedded history of slavery. The criticism seemed to be implying that we should get over slavery, that somehow we have gotten over it, that black women writers are now the mainstream, and therefore, when we give awards to black writers, feeling smug is a stock reaction "like laughter when yet another stand-up comic says f--k," and we should stop congratulating ourselves. Is that what we are doing? In the words of SNL's Weekend Update routine: "Really?" Does the article writer think we are overcompensating by giving awards to black women? That white males are being swept under the rugs? (As a counterexample: I look at The New York Review of Books and count how many women contributors there are each month. Not even close to half. Not even a handful.) Ultimately, if you watch the speech and read the interview with Nikky Finney, you can see how good a writer she is. Why be mad about giving her an award?

People are maddest when it's their own fault.

They are mad at themselves. They feel criticized, knowingly or not.

Remember that when someone projects and launches their rage at you.

Use it in a story and it will feel very, very real.

iBook, 2008

Three Writers Find a Medium

2011-11-16T20:37:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time there were three writers and they all thought differently. The first writer said, "Let me tell you about those two people over there sitting on that bench. He was wondering where she had bought her coat." The second writer said, "They were drawn together like curtains in the night. Loose, unfolding." And the third writer said, "I keep hearing them talking in my head. Her: 'What are you staring at?' Him: 'I think, maybe…' Her: 'You are looking at me as if I have food on my face' (she licks her upper lip). Him: 'You got it.'" It appears they were a fiction writer, a poet, and a playwright, all writers, each with a special approach.

In the creative writing program at San Francisco State University that (ifallgoeswellknockonformica) I am set to graduate from in the spring we have three genres (applying? pick one): fiction, poetry, or playwriting. When I was first applying I was trying to decide between fiction and poetry. I had mostly been writing poetry, thinking in metaphors, rhythms, images, and moments, but I had also re-entered the narrative world by writing down the story in every day. My friend and mentor asked,"What do you like to read?" That settled it. I wanted to read stories. The metaphors, rhythms, images, and moments could be incorporated into the stories.

As an MFA student at SFSU I found that I also needed what they call a "correlative," an area of study outside my major (fiction). It could be English, drama, history—really anything at all. I knew people doing urban planning, poetry, and environmental studies. I needed four classes in it, whatever it was. Since I was in school to write and learn, I chose playwriting. I hadn't written a play since fifth grade but could it be so different from what I was already doing? If so, how?

Well, I found out how.

Each genre takes a different approach. Very strange. You can watch a scene unfold in your head for all three, but how you deal with that scene is what is characteristic to that genre. If you describe the action, include the dialogue, add in the characters' thoughts, you've got the beginning of a story. If you take what you see and connect it to something else, use metaphors and similes, look for the bigger picture, philosophise, perhaps, or choose words that sound right, feel right, and give a mood or capture one moment, you're likely starting a poem. If you watch the scene and you hear the dialogue and let the characters show each other and you what they want through their conversation in a dramatic, heightened way, well, that means a scene is coming. (These are quick and simplified visions of what fiction, poetry, and playwriting are, but I think they capture the essences.) If you are having trouble writing, it is possible that you need to approach the material differently.

An exploration—whether you are a seasoned or beginning writer—is to try choosing a scenario, or find your story of the day, and write it from each of these angles: a narrative story, a poem, a play scene. You may find that the material works better in one form over another. I recently had an idea that seemed dramatic enough to be a scene, but as I began listening to the characters I found them boring. I switched to fiction mode and the scene turned into a one-page story; I was much happier with it. I had found the right medium.

It's Not You, It's Me: Fiction and/or Nonfiction

2011-11-10T19:30:00.000-08:00

We've all seen the notice: this story, play, film is a work of fiction, all characters are imaginary, any relation to living human beings is purely coincidental. And we laugh and say "Right. If they have to say that then surely it's all true." But we are wrong. Only some of it is true.

The most hilarious incidents in writing workshops are when a student blurts out "that part could never happen" and, of course, that is the one true incident around which the story was built. It is possible that it did happen, but for some reason it does not have emotional resonance with the reader.

The most powerful stories often are based on events that were truly felt. Even though the names are changed, the characters may be different genders, ages, or ethnicities, and the setting is elsewhere, the emotional content is the same. Which is where it gets tricky. Someone recognizes herself in the cloak. If it's a kindly portrait, she's flattered and pleased, if not, she's livid, hurt, humiliated.

Excuse me, these are words on a page. You say, "That character is not you. I don't care if you think it is, or if you are suspicious it might be based on you. It isn't you anymore." But, alas, you are a fiction writer, and you are not believed.

In art, if you create a portrait that the portrait sitter does not recognize (or thinks is hideous), she is hurt: "That doesn't look like me," she says. In fiction you are not intending the portrait to be recognizable; in a specific kind of art (nonfictive art?), you are. Expressive art is more akin to fiction: an interpretation, a transformation.

Fiction is a subset of nonfiction. Look, it's even in the word nonfiction, which is the negative, so fiction must be the positive. Fiction is a staging of a lived experience, a reimagining. It is hard to say what nonfiction is. We sometimes confuse it with reality. And the only reality I know right now… is that you are reading this.

Smiled Politely and Left, 2008

A Folded Multi-Page Book

2011-11-06T18:13:00.000-08:00

A reader sent me a link to a video she made of the "Guest Book," a structure designed by Paul Johnson, which in turn gave me another idea. Here is a hybrid version: the Guest Book merged with the X Book. You get seven page spreads without any glue, thread, tape, or staples (please, no tape or staples, ever!) to hold it together. For content you only have to print on one side.

Fold a piece of paper into 16 sections: fold in half, lengthwise; fold both edges back to the center fold, accordion style; smooth out the paper, turn over; fold in half widthwise; fold the edges back to the center fold. Open flat.

For a portrait style book, turn the paper vertically for the cuts. For a landscape style book, turn the paper horizontally.

Cut a capital i along the folds: through, above, and below the center panels. Make two horizontal cuts at the edges, centered, one panel wide. (These are like the cuts for the Guest Book, page 51, MHB.)

Open the center flaps out like window shutters.

Fold up and in half, flaps inside and touching themselves on the same side.

Fold edge back, accordion style.

Turn over. Fold remaining edge back, accordion style.

Stand up the book.

Push book together at the center (like the X book, page 32).

Wrap one page around for the cover.

There, I suppose, you have a GuestX book.

To see the layout of the page numbers more easily, click on a picture.

Blank Books, Book Art, Book Art Objects

2011-11-03T07:44:00.000-07:00

When you begin a book you may not start with a fully realized intention, but you likely have an impulse. As you proceed, you may find that you are enjoying the binding and decide you will make a blank book. Or the materials suggest a larger concept which you develop into book art*: the pages meant to be viewed and read. Or the shape of the book suggests an obvious concept so you make a book that doesn't open or is more appealing as a sculpture: a book art object. Each of these kinds of books is gratifying to make. The question becomes: who is it for? That answer may shape further making.

It is much easier to make a blank book and release it to the artist's or writer's hands to fill. If you are a writer a blank book is valuable and has potential: ultimately, it is the writer who decides how to give a blank book meaning. In the New York Times column "Writers on Writing" from July 5, 1999 called "Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen or Just Any Paper," author Mary Gordon writes about how she chooses her materials to help her write. In one closet she devotes one shelf to notebooks: she collects these from her travels around the world and each one inspires her writing in a different way. If you are the bookmaker you have to concentrate on design and craft, but for a blank book you don't have to develop a deep concept; you are making a product. Making book art is the hardest because you have to do everything and you have to dig deep to do it.

The "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" known as xkcd by Randall Munroe posted this provocative comic recently, titled "Alternative Literature," which caused me to experience: a groan, a chuckle, a sigh, a nod, a head shake, and a cry.

What is real? What is true? In this case, I think it matters whether you are the maker, the writer, or the reader. If you go to the actual website, you can mouse around and find a hidden text that pops up when you hover and then stop your mouse. In the "mouseover text" or "hover text" in this comic he gives an anecdote about truth in advertising. What I see is the dilemma of blank books, or the Emperor's New Books.

As a maker, if you want to try making a living at what you do, you must be a salesperson with the goal of selling work, or both an artist and a salesperson. It's not an either/or decision; it's just good to be aware of which goal you are working toward and what your intentions are. Making blank books with interesting covers is a wonderful way to experiment and to improve technical skills; I had fun making "Pop Art Journals" with soda cans wrapped around boards, but these are blank and ready for someone else to buy and fill. I would never enter them in a show because they may be crafted well, but beyond the novelty of the cover there is nothing there. Perhaps they will inspire a writer, but I cannot pretend they are book art. The book as book art should embody a complete and finished concept, inside and out. Book art objects with no content inside can work if they are elaborate and detailed, present a new view of the world, and are meant to be complete as they stand.

The above comic also reminds me of something that I hear frequently from those who are trying to make book art, "I want the reader to get whatever s/he wants out of it." Perhaps what they are really making is a community project, workbook, game, or mirror: all valid for what they are. I would argue, however, as I have done before, that the artist—whether making book art or book art objects—needs to give the reader something to grab hold of, a new angle to launch and catch his/her imagination, curiosity, and attention. Something meaningful, delightful, important, or audacious to think about. All kinds of stories. Something to come back to. Something that will last.

*I am including everything from fine printing to photocopied books to one-of-a-kinds in the category of book art

Rounded Corners for Photos

2011-10-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, we are all in ecstasy over rounded corners, be they of paper or of photographs. I admittedly possess several physical corner rounding punches and I use them (as I did for Days Made Strange). But I wanted to inkjet print some photos onto cardstock and I wanted the edges rounded as they printed. Photoshop doesn't actually have a button to click or a filter for this, but I found a set of instructions online. However, a few steps were missing for me. Here's my version (I'm using Photoshop CS3). It goes pretty fast. (For actual, physical, corner rounding punches, see the best inexpensive one here, and a pricier, industrial strength one here.)

Open the file of your photo by dragging it to Photoshop. Adjust to the size you desire by going to the Menu Bar and clicking Image < Image Size. For printing out, make sure it is 300ppi.
Go to Menu Bar, click on Layer < New < Layer.
On the Tools Palette select the rounded rectangle tool (with the other shapes and lines). Look at the little box at the top under the menu bar and set to Radius: 40 px or whatever corner roundness you prefer. Make and center the rounded rectangle over your photo. The color doesn't matter.
On the Menu Bar go to Layer < Layer Style < Blending Options. Slide Advanced Blending, Fill Opacity to 0%.
On Layers Palette, go to Paths. Click on the little lines above the right scroll bar there. Highlight "Make Selection." Make sure Feather Radius is set for 0 pixels and anti-aliased.
Menu Bar, go to Edit < Copy Merged (this is important).
Menu Bar, go to File < New. Create a new file from clipboard.
Paste in. Rounded photo!
Save as jpeg.

Here, the corners appear white since they are presented on the Blogger border, but on paper you won't notice any border; you'll just see the rounded corners. Try using one of the other shapes. For fun, I changed a photo of my neighbor cat into a portrait (made sepia in iPhoto) using the ellipse. Introducing Zoe, Her Royal Fluffiness…

The Details of Home in a Daydream

2011-10-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

In French, I learned recently, the word for home is similar to "in the house" or "at the house" or, occasionally "the house of me": the physical dwelling encompasses both one's heart and one's hearth; it is the structure that matters. Home as a concept does not translate otherwise from English to French. Gaston Bachelard (a Frenchman) spends quite a bit of time talking about the house in The Poetics of Space, a book I am reading for a class in creative nonfiction taught by Peter Orner.

The writing dwells on a few concepts that fascinate me: that the house in which we were born becomes the basis for all references thereafter to houses and homes; the notion that our daydreams are overlaid onto this place; and that a description of it, a sketch in words by one writer, will send the reader into his/her own reverie, out of the book and into an experienced place.

Our birth homes stay with us. We compare our subsequent dwellings to them. We look for the corners of comfort, solace, solitude, and inspiration that we might have had before. We may have had a place, or several places, in that house to go and think. When we remember that place, we may remember what we used to think or daydream about while there. I remember a covered patio, for example, and thinking about the phrase "childhood is the happiest time of your life" and wondering if it were going to be true. If this was a place we went or hid frequently, many daydreams might be housed here. We've sat there thinking many times before. Conversely, we might remember something, then see an image of the place. This is strange: remembering about thinking and remembering where we were when we were thinking.

And how does this translate to books or art or writing? I've written about the book as place before, and how it can function as an architectural space; now, thanks to Bachelard (who mentions it), I'm interested in how much detail the book needs to have to make it a space that interests the reader as well. Simply, a window, a door, a peaked roof says "house" to western culture. If you say "family room," I see both the playroom from when I was 0-4 years old and the family room I knew from ages 6 and up. Writing "family room" tickles my memories, and so I see that room in my mind, based on my experiences. Those two rooms, even if I add wood paneling and a stone fireplace or linoleum floor and sliding glass windows won't create the same image in your mind. You will never see what I see (unless, perhaps, you lived in my house with me), no matter how many words I give you.

But if I don't give you enough words, hints, or details, I may leave you empty. What if I only write "room" or draw a square? Take a minute. Are the edges blurry as you try to dream up an image? Which room is it? Can you see it? It seems like that room has four blank walls. Well, now it does. Maybe you saw it more clearly since I mentioned empty and blank and four walls.

I wonder, then, how do we build for the reader? Maybe we are not building a solid space, but only painting a feeling or mood. Certain qualities live in words, colors, and textures and will conjure up universal feelings, I think—the warmth of wood or the coolness of stone, for instance. You don't and won't see my wood paneling, although I could tell you if it were maple or teak or pine, which might clarify your picture. The reader needs a few details as an entry point: to grab hold of; to cart back home; and to send her or him into a daydream so s/he can fill in the gaps and truly live in the space.

Blueprints for a Birdhouse, 2011

Images for Books: Finding the Right Number

2011-10-24T08:32:00.000-07:00

In working with words and images in book form, how do you decide what is the right number of images to use? Someone said he wanted to work with fifteen images but didn't want the finished book to look like a photo album or scrapbook. Is fifteen too many? If the images were scattered throughout a 200 page book, I'd say not at all. But let's say you want to make a book that can be read at one sitting. Fifteen is a lot to take in, unless the images are sequential.

Part of what makes a book special is the concept of memory. Every time we turn the page we have to remember what came before, and not just what immediately came before, but everything up until that point. According to early studies of working memory capacity, it was found that we only remember seven things at a time. That idea has been expanded, depending on the category: seven numbers, yes, but we can also remember other things in about four chunks, each chunk comprised of several things (apparently we can remember more short words and fewer long words, for example.) So perhaps we should approach sequence and ordering in chunks! For our purposes, let's make these chunks smaller than conventional chapters.

It is possible that fifteen images could be used if they were grouped, and particularly if each image in a group had a relationship to the others. I would argue that anytime you put two images side-by-side you will subconsciously want to link them.

A conversation begins. Now what if you add a third party (or took out the second one?):

A conflict is set up. Or a turn in the conversation. A bit like six-word stories, but in this case each image stands for two words. Something changes and builds. Our eyes dart around, trying to help us fill in the conceptual gaps, searching our experiences for similar scenes.

If you must use fifteen images you could continue adding them, creating layers and complex connections. As the pages turn, the images would stack up in memory to create an overall effect. You could also create several (three to five?) grouped chapters and leave space or put a story, poem, or dream between them. Try varying the number of images or the length of the writing. The reader's mind can now hold one idea at a time in a deeper form. Adding words that convey an impression of mood, tone, or conceptual qualities would be more effective and interesting than writing a literal description, I suspect. If the images are sequential, the final impression may be simpler: the reader can hold the basic idea but may not have to remember the details. If you have sequential images, you could alternate between a story told in words and a story told in images; a wonderful example of how this works is in The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

Words and images do different things when you look at them. I notice that after turning a few pages of a purely visual book I begin experiencing it as if I were floating on my back in a warm pool and my ears were partially submerged. When I get back to words I hear voices in my head again: they feel much louder. I love verbal language, but sometimes it's nice to have that quiet, wordless space to move around in for awhile.

(For a visual poem, mostly comprised of linked imagery, see the 2010 film Somewhere by Sofia Coppola. For music that may put you in that warm pool or even to sleep, listen to "Weightless" by Marconi Union.)

Con(temporary) Neighborhood Art

2011-10-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

The art on the street keeps moving. A white truck idles in a driveway with the word “Hauling” painted on it, graffiti-style. Around the corner, the little bulldozer continues taking down the green house, making way for a garden. The red concrete steps are still there, leftover after the party, waiting for a ride home. I walk past the house, up the perpendicular street and turn left; the path becomes leafy and winding. Sometimes, the deer startle me and are startled by me in the foggy mornings as I march on up, but there are only birds and gardeners today. Almost at the top, one street turns into another at the cobblestone path where I often turn my ankle, so I cross the street before I get there. Here, the numbers change, seeming like centuries: down, the 500s; up, the 1800s. Someone has spraypainted a face on a discarded wheeled wooden crate out at the curb. I think it is cheerful.

Up at the top of the hill, new pink graffiti matches the faded red curb and adorns the glass-faced bus stop map. It possible that the rare woman tagger paints in pink to be seen. Past the pink graffiti, a wooden fence sports multicolored chalk marks, mostly vertical lines in rows and overlapping, clearly done by children, likely who live there, likely given permission. Similar affirmations, a block apart.

At the rock park, a half -dozen sixty-year-olds are standing around something I don’t recognize. A smallish, maybe three-foot square concrete pad with one step has been installed as a kind of pedestal to an enormous concrete urn. A man with a tape measure is gesturing and looking at it. A woman with a canvas hat on a cord keeps putting her palm on the urn as he talks and taking it off again. The urn is man-sized.

Down and around, past the garden with the cattails, past the newly landscaped yard is the twin urn. Identical. Separated at birth? On the one hand I want a little plaque at the rock park, explaining, on the other, placing new concrete next to the ancient rock seems like vandalism. I heard that those little plaques are urban graffiti for the rich. The walls of both urns are plain and blank.

Down near the demolition site again, the corner smells of camphor chips, a reminder of the newly removed tree. Diagonally across the street, most of the green house is gone. The red front steps are abandoned and cracked now in pieces. I can clearly see the peach-colored house and the gray-blue house flanking the lot. The green house isn’t a house anymore.

Farther south, down this street, eleven cardboard boxes are neatly stacked in three columns on the parking strip. Two Asian men are having a conversation a few feet away. The shorter, older man holds a box under his arm while he talks. He looks like he has forgotten he is holding the box. The printing on the boxes says: MYTEK / Lab Coats / Color: DK BLU / SIZE: XL. I wonder what sort of protection they offer.

In the late evening, I go back to the lot where the house once was. Everything is gone, even the red steps. It is leveled. A new canvas, waiting. Except this one is framed with a fence.

Writing Tiny Stories

2011-10-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

A little world exists in a few words. The most famous tiny story is the six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."* While the word choice is important to create the story, the spaces between the words are actually what gives the story life. The reader must infer or imagine if this story is a plain advertisement or a tragic tale. Because the story has gotten so much acclaim, we must infer that it is a tragic tale.

Many people have seized upon the gimmick of a six-word story and written what they think is a story, but not as many have actually succeeded encapsulating a world. Breaking it down, bit-by-bit we have first "For sale." Someone doesn't want or need something, s/he desires to either make money and/or get rid of the shoes. "Baby shoes" is next. We assume that either the shoes have been outgrown or someone has a shoe store. "Never worn" tells us the shoes are new. The reader realizes that either the baby was never born or that the baby has died. A relative must be selling the shoes, perhaps the mother or the father. Change has occurred. Tragedy in six words.

One reason it works is that a conflict is set up and developed. The concepts rub against each other and create a scene. "For sale" is general and familiar and gives us the desire. "Baby shoes" gives us a person to imagine, either the baby or a parent. "Never worn" creates the context and tells us that something actually happened.

Peggy Gotthold of Foolscap Press recently created a book of six six-word stories by six writers. I also think that just one six-word story has great potential to become book art. The book itself can provide the setting and the tone with color, texture, binding, and pacing.

Let's see how writing a six-word story might work. We'll try for subtext: we should be able to read the story on more than one level of meaning. Let's start with three questions:

what is desired?
who/what is involved?
what is the outcome or consequence?

This is harder than I thought it would be. Some kind of gain or loss seems to work.

Airport shuttle has broken clock. Sorry!
Hungry cat meets skunk at dinner.
Horse falls. Winner by a nose.
Old boat. Wet shoes. Date over.

Fabricated, 2010

*This is attributed to Hemingway. The story is that he wrote it on a napkin, but no one has been able to verify that these were actually his words and that the event actually happened. In any case, we do have the six-word story, which has sparked much imagination and many contests. Snopes.com has one explanation.

Good Endings

2011-10-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

What makes an ending good? If we're immersed in a good story, do we ever want it to end? What will convince us that we feel good—or at least satisfied—when something is over?

In Adam, a film by writer and director Max Mayer, one ending is shown, but in the Special Features section an alternate ending is listed. I didn't want to choose the ending. I wanted the artist to be confident and present his vision. But after watching the film I was not satisfied. Without giving a spoiler, I'll just say that the writer discarded the audience's feelings with the official ending. For the past ninety minutes, two characters had a relationship and we, the audience, had a relationship with both characters; sad or happy, we needed the right resolution with each.

I originally thought the alternate ending would be a cheesy, feel-good ending, but in fact the emotional landing point of the alternate ending was an open feeling of universal hope rather than what I was left with: the mundane feeling of "life goes on, we change, isn't it great." It turns out that the alternate ending was actually the film's original ending. The commentary tells us that when the film went to Sundance, the audience didn't respond to it, so Mayers changed it. Except, in my opinion, the audience was wrong. This is why artists don't make art by consensus: the results are mediocre.

What makes a good ending? I'm still struggling with this concept in my own work, and it fascinates me. The facts that the—what? eight minutes?—of the film's ending made such a huge impact on both the story and how I felt about it suggests that there may be many other salvageable stories out there. Maybe even some great ones. Eight minutes. One or two or three sentences. Very interesting. (Related post: Between the First & Last Lines.)

A writer whose work I'm immersed in currently, and who is becoming one of my favorite authors is William Trevor. Not only is his word choice and storytelling masterful, but the endings are almost always satisfying. They make sense with the story and they seem truthful even when they are sad. When I get to the end of one of his stories I tend to say, "ah, of course," because that end seems like the only end it could have. This doesn't mean it is predictable—because it never is—but just that it is fitting.

So, check it out. If you have a story in a drawer that is finished, but doesn't feel right, see what happens if you chop off the ending and rewrite it from a few different angles. If you're not sure how it works, try reading a substantial batch of Selected Stories and ask, "What would William Trevor do?"

It Wasn't Until I Saw You (volvelle with alternate endings), 2011

Beginning a Book

2011-10-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

"Where do you start when you make an artist's book?" is a question I am frequently asked. It corresponds to the question the writer is asked, "Where do you get your ideas?" And everyone jumps up and down when the answer is "From anywhere. From everywhere. From somewhere." But I'll tell you all the drawers out of which I pull beginnings. All you need is one beginning.

File drawer (Text). Past writings, journal notes, dreams. If I start with the text I'll copy it, then cut up the lines or phrases where they seem to naturally break or where I want a breath or pause or emphasis. I'll think about what kind of structure these words want to be in and the design, colors, and images are worked out intuitively afterwards. Often, the text-based book becomes part of an edition. I am much more confident I will finish a book if I start with a text. Sometimes I am wrong. Posts about where to start with writing are here and here and here and here. Search this blog under "writing" for more.

Anchovies & Gossip, 2008

Kitchen drawer (Materials). Objects and medium. Metaphorically, what do I want to cook with? Acrylic inks? Folded papers? Wool felt? I start taking out stuff and moving it around until I get a larger concept or find an object that becomes the catalyst. Once it was an anchovy tin.

Desk drawer (Binding). Structure and form. I might take out paper and start folding to see if I can find something new. Or I might fold, sew or glue an older, yet unusual, structure. I'll carry the blank book around with me and sit down periodically, flipping through the pages, trying to "read" it or see what it tells me. I'll take my cue from whatever comes to mind, my own Rorschach test.

When He Was Blind, 2009

Virtual drawer (Research). A word, concept, or thing catches my ear. I look it up in books, online, I ask people. I keep looking. The first thing leads me to something else, equally interesting. And off I go, sometimes following the threads across, or pursuing the research about the one thing and going even deeper. Braille and its origins, were one example. More ideas about research and lists are here.

Drawer of Curiosities (Concept). The questions lead the way. How can you make a book breathe with colored light (Go Change)? What kinds of word juxtapositions can you make when you change a letter or two (Spotted One Day)? How do you evoke steam on a page (Steaming on the Stovetop)? What if you could make a calendar/book where you would create a new haiku every day that wouldn't repeat for over a decade (Days Made Strange)? Working with a concept first is tricky; got to keep it fresh and layered and not devolve into a cute novelty. See more about "Conceptual Layering" in Making Handmade Books (240-242).

Carry On, 2010

Dresser drawer (Color). Something warm, something cool. I feel restless and can't figure out why. I take out paints or papers or wool roving and work with color first, shaping the mood intuitively. I might make a book with no words and wait. But I must look at it every day and focus on it if I want to complete it. If I can, I'll try to write a text afterwards. This is not always a success, but I always enjoy the process. Or it is a success and I learn something.

Forgotten drawer (Memories). Old letters, ephemera, or memory of a person. This book is often a gift for someone. An occasion of something. The person's life provides the content. I have to decide how to approach it, be it straightforward and chronologically, one story in the life of, a series of fragments, scans or photos of his/her stuff, or using actual materials linked to the person. I put it all in front of me at once, put things away I know I won't use, then just start pulling things out that call to me or have some emotional resonance.

So much to do! There's the physical object of the book, the content, the organization of the content, the design… so many choices to make! First we have to begin.

College Book Art Association Conference Coming

2011-10-06T09:24:00.000-07:00

The College Book Art Association has always had a conference in January, usually every other year. The first year (2009) the conference was at the University of Iowa. The second year (2011) it was at Indiana University Bloomington. Regarding the projected weather of both, the west-coasters said peculiar things. It turns out it was perfectly lovely and possible to take a walk in the snowy air by hopping from one heated building to the next.

But guess what? You can come to the conference this year in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of us do not surf or sunbathe in winter, but if we take off our gloves to take a picture our hands stay warm.

It is true that the word "college" is in the name, but even if you are not part of a college and if you are serious about bookmaking and academic learning, you can register and attend the conference. The keynote address this year is by longtime and noted book artist Buzz Spector, and the banquet speaker is Brewster Kahle, well-known "computer engineer, internet entrepeneur, activist, and digital librarian." as they put it modestly on the CBAA website. His wife Mary Austin is one of the founders of the San Francisco Center for the Book. The Indiana keynote address was by Ann Hamilton, the subject of this post.

The conferences are a wonderful opportunity not only to hear what interests people from all over the country and abroad, but to meet and connect with bookpeople in person over a meal or after a session. I've met artists, writers, bookmakers, and educators I've heard about for years and have been introduced to enthusiastic new people as well. The energy level is high and inspiring.

January 5-7, 2012 will feature a book exhibition downtown at the San Francisco Public Library, panel sessions at what I call "the beautiful oasis" of Mills College and more sessions at the bay-front Hilton Garden Inn in Emeryville, California, lunches, coffee and snacks provided, and a banquet and auction on the final night.

If you register now you can benefit from the reduced earlybird price.
Let's talk about books.

artifacts from the Iowa conference

Challenged Books

2011-10-02T09:22:00.000-07:00

Every year in the fall, the American Library Association, in conjunction with the American Booksellers Association, in conjunction with other associations and towns, cities, and book lovers across the United States celebrate Banned Books Week. More than 11,000 books have been challenged since 1982, primarily due to an individual's or a group's discomfort or disagreement with issues raised in the books. You can see the ten most challenged books of 2010 here, where authors include Sherman Alexie and Aldous Huxley, and subjects include the Twilight series and gay penguins.

Authors are free to write. Publishers are free to publish. Libraries and book stores are free to order. Censorship is when the books that were readily available are pulled from the shelves. Those who challenge books are trying to censor what we read, sometimes without ever having read the books themselves, sometimes being afraid of the discussions that might occur if we do read them. The key to learning is through the discussion of all topics—whether we like the topic or not is irrelevant, and whether we change our minds or not doesn't matter as long as we are able listen. We are lucky in the U.S. that we have the freedom to read: a cause for celebration, indeed. Happy belated banned books week.

Book shown: T/ravel: Book, 2007

Enter Here: Repetition & Revision

2011-09-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Stream-of-consciousness writing can be a useful tool for freeing up words and ideas in preparation to make or write something, but if it is presented as an end product it may be hard on the reader. What does s/he make of seemingly unrelated imagery, disjointed phrases, a word written over and over? The visual equivalent is collage or assemblage in its rawest form; it contains everything imagined in one piece, as if the artist had horror vacui: a fear or dislike of leaving empty spaces. We don't mind these written and visual pieces, in fact we might even seek them out if we are interested in the artist's process, but if we are not interested in how the artist works, the pieces may appear confusing, jumbled, and disjointed. The viewer needs a way in, an entry point.

William James wrote about the adult stream of consciousness as a psychological phenomenon. James Joyce used the style in Ulysses. Some say Gertrude Stein used it as well. Writing classes use it as a writing practice: keep writing for n minutes without stopping, keep your pen moving, don't edit, let your mind wander as you write. The connections, I think, are between the flow of the material, the personal nature of one's thoughts, and the continuous change of those thoughts over time. For a writer who uses this method as a daily practice, s/he might be able to achieve the flow of repetition and revision that will be exciting and fresh. S/he may be able to discover and uncover surprising thoughts. But it will likely take some shaping and organizing to get to the heart of the work.

When my friend teaches a collage or assemblage workshop she advises students to discard most of the material they've assembled. More is not better in this case; it is only more confusing. It is fun to intuitively work with the material, moving it around, layering it, but the maker doesn't have to provide every single detail; s/he should try to leave a little room for the viewer's imagination, memory, and experiences. There's got to be a way to organize it, whether by color, shape, theme, or in a way that tells a story, which might be through juxtaposition, conflict, or through a relationship between the subjects. Writing can be organized by, but not necessarily limited to, theme/concept, chronology, character, or location.

A collection is often a catalyst for a project; it automatically has an organizing theme. For some reason I have boxes full of collected picture postcards, stamps ripped off of their envelopes, and a clothespin holding a stack of parking permits, among other ephemera. I could pick one of these collections and group the stamps by color, for example, or postcards by location, or parking permits by date, then transform them by adding a story or poem, creating a traveling character, or painting on top of them. I could make a flip book or a flag book, something that would show both the similarities and the differences. Or I could take just one image and write about it (or color copy or scan and print out multiple times). Then work with it again from a different angle and continue working—repeating and revising until something exciting emerges.

"Repetition and revision" is a concept that surfaced recently in the "Plays & Politics" class I am taking. The term is used in describing a storytelling style in some of Shakespeare's plays, in jazz, in Toni Morrison's Beloved, in learning to play an instrument, and in the plays of Suzan-Lori Parks. I think it is also useful to apply it to bookmaking and think about making books that are like jazz pieces. Repetition familiarizes us with the material and gives us a way in. Change wakes us up.

A Bouquet of Art in the Schoolroom

2011-09-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

So often, due to lack of funding, art is the first thing that is cut from the school curriculum. We who make it are always outraged. We know art matters, although we can't always articulate why it matters. In an inspiring recent article, Charles Blow wrote about a Head Start program in West Harlem in a renovated building formerly filled with illegal activities and shady characters that is now filled with art and light. The poor children who attend the program are thriving. Head Start is a national program for underprivileged preschoolers that provides education, food, health services and other services to prepare kids for school. The "other services" in this location happen to be inspiration and beauty through nature and art. And if the children's art is up on the walls, they learn pride as well. The issues raised in this article reveal an answer: children need hope in order to live and by viewing and making art they develop and maintain that hope.

We all need hope and inspiration. It is interesting that in harder economic times we tend to buy small things to keep ourselves going. I recently read that sales of nail polish, flowers, and handbags go up when the going is rough. Something beautiful makes us feel better, lifts our spirits. For some reason the lifting of the spirits is not in the California State Standards for art, although "aesthetic valuing" is. Many of the teachers know about the lifting of the spirits, thankfully, and are able to inspire as well as to instruct.

Ironically, at some public schools in New York, fire inspectors told the administrations that most of the art had to be removed from the walls. They said, "…no more than twenty percent of your wall space can have things hanging on it that are flammable." The unhappy schools have mostly complied, although I wonder if there might be some alternatives to the all or mostly nothing approach. The schools know that the kids are happiest surrounded by art and especially by art they create themselves.

Many of us believe that we should continue to make and fund art. We've heard the stories of kids who could finally express themselves, who were visual learners, and who found pride through their artistic talent. It is heartening to hear that art inspires hope. Hope isn't an extra quality to be given or taken as funding permits. Hope is essential to education.

Origami Envelope Pocket

2011-09-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

What's that in your pocket? I've included this little origami envelope in most of my instructional books because it makes a good pocket you can easily attach to a larger book. You can also use it alone and slip a little square book, card, or tag inside. Or bind several together to create a a book with all pocket pages. For content, think about what you carry in your pockets, a favorite article of clothing with pockets, memory of clothing with pockets, or a narrative about a hidden secret.

Try making square versions of these books and cards to slip inside the envelope: X book (32), Shorts book (35), Pants book (36), Snake book (39), Twist card (43) Miniature Tied binding (shown above, 65). Page numbers are from Making Handmade Books.

Creative Control & Responsibility

2011-09-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

Themed art exhibits and themed literary magazines generally make me uneasy unless I think I'm going to be able to experience the world differently, either by viewing them or by participating in them. Are they, on some level, transformative? An art show about polka dots, for example, could be all surface and dotty, or it could include the history of the name, fabrics made with dots, famous people who wear them and their biographies, and any political or social connotations, if such existed. Artists simply could be asked to submit work with dots or to submit well-rounded work that connects to these deeper themes. Interesting how deep this could go from such a light subject. In all cases, the curator makes the call. The curator, to make a book analogy, has the title, the covers, and selects the pages from the submissions. Submissions. Submit. Another reason to be uneasy. The artist is a contributor but not necessarily viewed as an individual. The curator/editor has the creative control and the overall vision. Which is great if you are the curator or the editor.

Or is it? With creative control comes responsibility for the outcome. A potential exhibit came up recently in Oakland. The Museum of Children's Art planned to show artwork from traumatized Palestinian children created in art therapy centers. Children's art. Did the children want to show this? If adults decide to show children's art, who has the creative control? What are they saying? Here, on the surface the statement is general and universal: war is bad, children suffer, look how children can work through trauma and express themselves through their art. Looking deeper, looking at MECA, the adult sponsor of the exhibit, you can't miss the pro-Palestinian statement when they gathered the work together (Israeli flags drawn on the military hardware, a few American flags on it as well). The museum was pressured to withdraw their intended exhibit. They were shocked, shocked to discover that the Middle East is a controversial topic. The curators surely weren't just using the art "to foster insight and understanding," (both are admirable) which is what their letter to the public implies. With such an explosive topic, it is naive to think that focusing on these children's use of art as an expressive medium was enough. The overall curatorial vision avoided the actual content. Suddenly, the cancellation of the exhibit became a political issue, as if it wasn't political up until this point.

The curators had a huge opportunity and a huge responsibility if they had chosen to proceed. The subject is large and complicated, with good guys and bad guys on both sides. They could have featured interactive activities, discussions, examinations of different cultures. Presenting hard topics is a hard task. These topics make people uncomfortable and they are confusing; the excuse for cancelling the exhibit was that the children wouldn't understand. That they would be frightened. The kids who are frightened live in our inner cities already and I don't see any exhibits of their work. Other children are frightened, too. In the "Plays & Politics" class I am taking currently, we were asked to write about our first political memory. Even though we are all different ages, half of the earliest memories were about war or worrying about being drafted and dying. War concerns many generations.

The museum could have shown that war affects all human beings by including work from Israeli children who have witnessed their own share of war as well. War is made by adults. Death doesn't choose sides.

These are children we are talking about. In this case, they were vulnerable children who were not making art to share with anyone; they were trying to work through their trauma, and their work was ostensibly going to be shown to demonstrate their feelings to the world. Artwork from adults is clearly a political statement. In an ideal world, perhaps, this show could have generated a thoughtful discussion rather than degenerate into the recent distracting, finger-pointing session about censorship. An exhibit is only as good as the vision that precedes it. With research, time, care, and planning, a themed show like this one could have been a transforming experience for everyone. Perhaps the discussion has just begun.

Walking with Maeve Brennan's Spirit

2011-09-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

"Somebody said, 'We are real only in moments of kindness.'"

The above quote is from the "Author's Note" to The Long-Winded Lady by Maeve Brennan. The book is a compilation of columns she wrote for the New Yorker in the 1950s-60s about her walks around New York. These are not sightseeing walks, yet she sees sights, most of which are contained within a few blocks of wherever she is currently living. There are old brownstones with restaurants underneath them, buildings in various states of demolition, one of her favorite eateries, Le Steak de Paris, and "The Farmhouse That Moved Downtown" (43). But more importantly to her are the people that come and go from these places and how they behave towards one another, the little moments of humanity within the rushing city.

In "On the A Train" from February 15, 1958, a man offers her his seat but she declines, mistakenly saying her stop is next. Although it becomes very important to her that she right her mistake so that the man does not think ill of her, she worsens the situation. She ends the piece with "Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do" (16). This feeling carries over into a story from July 23, 1960, "Giving Money in the Street" (175). Brennan gives an "unfortunate-looking woman" a dollar, but the woman repeatedly calls after her, "It's too much." Brennan feels uneasy thinking about why this should be so. Her moments of kindness, such as the one in the latter piece, actually become her challenges. Perhaps this is the reality, then: we face conflicts when we are awakened from our entrenched thoughts and worn routines, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

Brennan finds these moments of challenge in what I call the "stories in the days." I'm a fan of the story in the day—and one is always there, if only we watch for it. Brennan made watching for those stories her job, and she got paid to notice them. Reading her observations, frettings, and musings heightened my own awareness and got me looking very closely at a routine walk that I take around my neighborhood. I started choosing objects along the walk to revisit and I started watching for changes. A monumental urn was placed in a park where the day before no urn existed. A house was demolished over the period of five days. Chairs migrated to the curb, then disappeared. A discarded wooden box was eventually spraypainted with a colorful face. I started listening to the snippets of conversations and arguments of other walkers passing me, and I imagined the kinds of challenges they faced.

I walked with a friend recently past some Jehovah's Witnesses who commented on her "nice hound." When she and I sat down at a shady bench in a park nearby they approached us, asking us if we would like some reading material. It was a Friday. She told them "Shabbat Shalom" and that she was Jewish. "Shalom means peace, doesn't it?" asked one man. Yes, it does. She smiled radiantly at them and they went on their way. She said, "Instead of an uncomfortable moment, I like to make it a teaching moment."

All these details are teaching moments. I'm still walking, examining, revisiting, and listening. The focus on these details is like getting a hearing aid or a new paintbrush and adds clarity, humility, and color to my walks. I thank my friend, and if I could, I would thank Ms. Brennan (1917-1993). These are real gifts, just right, not too much at all.

At the New Yorker's website you can read some of the abstracts/summaries of the Maeve Brennan's columns by searching the archive for "long-winded lady." If you are a subscriber already, you can read the full stories.

One Nation

2011-09-11T08:17:00.000-07:00

I was moved to print this card the second week of September, 2001. Here in the United States we had suffered a tragedy together which caused us to be kinder to one another…for a little while. There's a big to-do over this, the tenth anniversary, a look at how we were changed, memories of the event, memorials of those who died. But what is even more heartbreaking to me is that ten years later we really are back to "authority and rigid thinking." We aren't working together to make our world or anyone else's a better place to live. On September 1, President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner were in disagreement over the "date and time of the president's much-awaited speech" about increasing jobs and fixing the economy. Really? One nation…divided again.

We really should remember.

A Book for Michelle Carter's Play

2011-09-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

When Michelle Carter asked if I (or someone I knew) could make a scrapbook prop for her latest play Patience Worth, I was delighted and said I'd do it. I don't ordinarily make scrapbooks, I'm not close to being a scrapbooker, but I do make things periodically for friends. In this case, the scrapbook is integral to the play: it is only through these clippings that a young girl knows her spirit mother. Michelle only knew she wanted something nice and something different, but she couldn't tell me anything specific. The only constraints she gave me were that the book had to look real because the front row of the audience would be able to see it up close, and it had to be able to be refilled. Commissioned projects can be satisfying or alarming: the person can love whatever it is that you do, or s/he already has something in mind but can't describe it. It is always frustrating when the person sees it and says, "Oh, but I really wanted ______."

It was hard to know where to begin. I needed a context, a reason. What should the book feel and look like? How big? What kinds of materials? I asked to read the script; she sent a scene where the girl is reading snippets of the clippings aloud. The time was the early 1920s in St. Louis, so I researched scrapbooks of that time and based a design on those images. The hinged hard cover has two holes with eyelets: the wire-edged ribbon runs through them. The endpapers are acrylic ink painted Tyvek, the cover is a handcut stencil with gold gesso. For the articles, I took some of Michelle's written words, created titles, filled them out with lorem ipsum, and laserprinted them. Stonehenge is a thick paper with a manufactured deckle edge so I cut the paper to make use of the deckle and adhered the articles to the pages with photo corners and/or glue stick. All this paper gives the book a solid feeling.

So much trust goes into this kind of project. It is a relief when it works.

The play opens Friday, September 9, 2011 at Thick House in San Francisco (1695 18th Street), and runs through Sunday, October 2.

Margaret Kilgallen: Artistic Lineage

2011-09-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

It is an interesting feeling to walk into a room and find that the art is solid and grounded, and that the work has many deep roots, connected both downward and outward. I am sorry I never met Margaret Kilgallen because her art evokes that feeling for me. I saw her work at the Art in the Streets graffiti show at LA MOCA and didn't know and later couldn't even remember her name, but I knew I needed to find out.

I was drawn to her work immediately because the lettering resembled old wood display type. At the time, I wondered if these were salvaged signs made into sculpture, but soon learned she had painted them all new, herself. It was uncanny. Who was she and why were these giant letters, clearly made with historical knowledge and research, in a graffiti show? I wanted to understand her story from the letterpress and bookmaking angle, if there was one.

And there was. She studied printmaking and learned letterpress at Colorado College (BFA, 1989) from Jim Trissel and later worked in a letterpress shop and as a bookbinder for the San Francisco Public Library in 1990, after volunteering for awhile. She was interested in fifteenth and sixteenth century letterforms as well. At SFPL she met Daniel Flanagan and from him learned more about book conservation and how to repair paper, which is likely why some of her paintings are on discarded book pages. She painted on gallery walls and on outside walls in the Mission district. Margaret Kilgallen and several others were dubbed as part of the Mission School of art because of their geographic location, their new approach, and their subject matter: graffiti, skateboards, surfing, trains.

Additionally, Kilgallen depicted "strong women," particularly unknown or formerly invisible ones such as: Fanny Durack, an Australian swimmer who was the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal; Matokie Slaughter, the first woman banjo player she heard on an Old Time record; Algia Mae Hinton, who played guitar and buckdanced; Kathleen Hanna, rock star. An extremely wonderful (and well-made) book, published in 2005 that has many full-color plates, two essays and excerpts from an interview with her is Margaret Kilgallen: In the Sweet Bye & Bye (available through Giant Robot). She says, "I don't like to choose people that everybody knows. I like to choose people who just do small things and yet somehow they hit me in my heart" (120-121). Many of the words Kilgallen painted were these women's names.

She was connected to other women artists such as Ann Hamilton and Ann Chamberlain, with whom she worked as they installed their incredible project at SFPL at Civic Center in 1996: 50,000 altered catalogue cards inset into the walls. You can see two of Gilgallen's 'zines (both from approximately 1998): "Nellie was there" and "Fly by Night," in the library's own Little Maga/Zine collection. Books and type continued to interest her even as she painted.

In a video interview here, Daniel Flanagan, currently a book conservator for the California State Library, notes that the bottoms of her painted trees look like the serifs at the bottom of letterforms. She liked what he calls "vernacular typography:" handpainted signwork, posters "that were printed, really, using wood type."(minute 5:30) Her work is also rooted in Japanese woodblock prints and Asian calligraphy, where the artist/writer used one brush for both writing and painting.

Kilgallen says of Flanagan, "He taught me to work with the flow of the hand. If you're sewing a book, you don't stop…because by having that flow… it will show, and your work will come out better" (118). The flow does show in her paintings; it is hard to tell where lines begin or end. She always painted by hand, going over and over the lines, never projecting the letters or using stencils. This practice, this attention to detail, put the movements and marks inside her body, ready when she needed them.

The source of this installation: when she was on a surfing trip to Mexico she saw shacks made of billboards, which inspired her try making them herself (66-67).

Part of the essence of her art, the impulse behind it, was her dislike of being constantly being bombarded by inane subject matter, particularly from billboards. Countering this irritation, she presented her own symbols and vocabulary, all created by hand. In addition to the big wall paintings, she stitched together small paper paintings into larger, quilt-toplike forms or hung many framed works close together, a bombardment of her own style. She says, "We completely block it [advertising] out as if we don't see it, but for some reason we don't think of it as garbage…That's like mind garbage…people might want to put their own visuals—graffiti—in their own neighborhood, something that they could relate to" (123-124).

She sounded like she cared deeply for her work, for people, for the world. "She was always leaving out half her sandwich for whoever might want it," says Flanagan (10:48).

You can find out more about Kilgallen from an essay by Aaron Rose as well as through photographs of her work in Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, which is both a book and a video. You can see some long excerpts on YouTube. A good video, an excerpt from the PBS series is Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century, which captures Kilgallen, her work, and her philosophy. The following is a short clip to give you an idea.

Margaret Kilgallen died of complications from breast cancer in 2001, at age 33, three weeks after her daughter was born. Her husband, artist Barry McGee, and her daughter Asha Kilgallen-McGee carry on.

July 2011, outside MOCA, someone had installed this tribute to her—a bicycle garden. I discovered later that it was instigated by Randall Poster and Aaron Rose. The handlettered beige sign in light blue, black, and warm red (by the green bike) reads: This Mobile Bike Farm at MOCA / is Dedicated to the Memory of Artist / Margaret Kilgallen / (1967-2001) / Designed By: Futurefarmers / Tended By: Silver Lake Farms / Presented by Wild Goodness and Levi's Film Workshop.

Margaret Kilgallen stretches and reaches out and through her artistic roots to us. Grow, art, grow.

100th Post: ArtBeets, Why Not?

2011-09-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

Since we were talking about numbers and specific numbers seem to be important and since the publishers of Making Handmade Books wanted one hundred in the title, I thought I would point out that this is my one hundredth post. In fact, to celebrate, I will make it only one hundred words.

What occurred to me the other day, when I asked myself why I was doing something odd was, “why not?” No good reason not to. So “why not” is both a good answer and a good question.

Thanks for reading. Your comments charge me up.
More to come…

A Trick for the Ruler Challenged

2011-08-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

Days Made Strange, 2011

It has taken me—no, I'm not going to bother to say, it's too ridiculous—a million years (there, I said it) to finally become comfortable sight-reading a ruler. If I were smarter, I would have done everything in metric, truly. But I think I've got it now. Except when I don't.

I remember numbers out of order—that seems to be the biggest problem. I'm working on an edition of forty book/calendars and I've cut at least three of the inner holders incorrectly. I knew it was supposed to be 1 1/4", but when I looked at the diagonal cut I made (it was supposed to be straight) and remeasured it, one mark was at 1 1/2". Argh. I needed a template so I didn't have to remember the number six times per holder. And I had a second spot that needed to be measured at 1/2". What to do?

Hooray for artist's tape! I taped one side of my ruler—the one I could read most easily (in 8ths, not 16ths of an inch). I left the other side free of tape so I could use it for cutting. My work is going much faster. I hope yours does. Metric users, do you ever have this problem? Just wondering.

Tape the interval you need on one edge of the ruler.

Use the untaped side to cut against.

Use thinner slices of tape for a second interval.

Arts & Crafts, Punk & DIY: Movements & Messages

2011-08-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

We're back at that place where everyone wants to see the hand. Today, if it's perfect it's too slick or lacks feeling. Punk rock had this aesthetic, too; you didn't have to know how to play an instrument, you just had to have strong feelings, plenty of stamina, and the drive to be heard. But punk had anti-establishment, anti-corporation, anti-racist and anti-sexist politics behind it. The Arts & Crafts Movement, by contrast, promoted fine craft and skill, honoring the maker (anyone could be trained) and was partially in response to the poor working conditions and treatment in the factories. Today we have a mixture in the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement: anyone can make anything and the handmade is praised, but nothing has to look precise. It's about challenges. It's about doing. At least that is what it looks like to me.

The Arts & Crafts movement glorified both the beauty of the object and how it enhanced everyday life as well as the pride of the maker. William Morris, in the 1890s, focused on fine materials in his Kelmscott Press books, which included handmade paper, woodcuts, and hand printing. I don't think beauty or quality is entering into the picture today, though. I think it is the coolness of the act of making the product that is the source of awe. The eyes-open "how'd you do that" or "how'd you think of that" rather than the "how did you learn to do that so well." We've got YouTube so anyone can make a video, no matter how good. We've got MP3 players where the quality of the music isn't what people are after—it's the accessiblity. There has been a renewed interest in LPs, but it is possible people also like the "authentic" pops and skips along with the finer (in general) sound.

Maybe it is actually character that people want. A personalization of a thing that makes it unique and stands alone from others. I think that longing for uniqueness gets confused sometimes with something roughly made. Nobody really ever wanted pops and skips on a record when records were the norm, for example. The disinterest in perfection, or I'd rather call it precision, is also possibly a reaction against big box stores, generic malls, and sameness found in certain areas across the United States.

Each of these "movements" was/is a reaction to the times with punk the most overtly political of the three. In a compilation of essays by Greil Marcus called Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92, I found a some interesting examples of progressive sociopolitical views. The Clash incorporated Jamaican reggae into their music and wrote about social problems such as haves and have nots. The Raincoats is fronted by three women who wanted "to put a bit of a distance between what we do and the rock 'n' roll tradition" which was "based in the exclusion of women and the ghettoization of blacks" (113). Gang of Four looks at the corporations, how capitalism affects people's everyday lives, and bases some of the their lyrics on advertising propaganda. Interesting how the street posters for these bands (or bands like them) were the photocopied, disjointed, cut-and-paste variety reminiscent of Italian Futurism founder and pro-Fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who promoted war and technology, the abolition of galleries and museums, and capturing the feelings of speed, movement and flight in art.

We've been at war for decades now, but there's no big rebellion in the DIY movement (unless you want to count the computer and cell phone hackers…). Perhaps it is about looking for something positive, a reaching out for community, a culture of sharing, collaboration, reusing information and materials. We still have the artist/crafters who take pride in their skill and ability to make beautiful things, as evidenced in magazines like Fiber Arts (final issue: Summer 2011) and Fine Woodworking and there is a little overlap, but the emphases are different, including a devotion of fine crafters (as evidenced in FWs website) to "becoming better" and "excellence."

To become better acquainted with DIY, I hunted through some back issues of Make magazine: most of which had to do with electronics and science and contained great hacks (challenges to be accepted when faced with either a device that won't let you do something or just to see if you can, such as a webcam attached to a vacuum cleaner). I found only one woman listed in the front of each issue (if that). It did include a couple of craft-related things, such as making buttons from fallen tree branches which I immediately had to try. I made nearly a dozen buttons before I remembered I had other work that needed to be finished. The buttons are a bit crude—no wait—I mean rustic and unique. What will I do with them? I don't know. Did I enjoy myself? Oh, yeah!

Craft magazine is the sister magazine, geared primarily to what women have typically been interested in making (knitting, sewing, cooking) and to the current recycle/reuse attitude towards materials. As a printer, however, I can't say I'm happy about the idea of the "Make a Type Cabinet into a Coffee Table" project, even if it does include welding.

Linked to both of these magazines is the Maker Faire, which started in 2006 and contains science, electronics, and crafts. I attended in 2009 & '10 and discovered: conductive thread that could be used to light up books and textiles; the needlefelting group; the steampunk costumes; the craft fair where I bought paper tape and cool stuff from Xylocopa; and the Doggie Diner heads. I took photos of the people—so many people!—that turned up and paid to visit this event. I made some linoleum cuts based on the photos and this summer printed Days Made Strange: a perpetual letterpress haiku calendar. My art was certainly inspired by my visit.

The mainstream craft end of the DIY movement appears to be pushing against the depersonalizing aspect of the digital boom; it's about working with your hands—making something, anything—and joining a community that makes. It's a democratic world where the people are important and equal and individuals are in control. The downside is that some of the aesthetics are actually anti-craft. By anti-craft I mean the excellence that comes from practice and skill. It's more about the process, the curiosity and "what if" rather than the art of expressing oneself and refining a technique.

Change is inevitable. It is possible that this is the beginning, that people will eventually want to refine the craft or have their project mean more to themselves and their viewers. In the late 1990s, just after the spotlight on book structures, people began to ask how they could make more than just interesting objects. They wanted to add content to their work. The content becomes the connector, reaching out to our shared emotions in a more permanent form.

Arts & Crafts wanted to promote beauty in our everyday lives. Punk wanted to free us up as individuals. DIY brings curiosity back into our experience. Each time there has been a desire to make something better: sometimes an object, sometimes the world, sometimes the process, sometimes a little of each.

Bibliography & Sources
Marcus, Greil. Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
Clark, Robert Judson, ed. The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1876-1916. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Belsito, Davis, Kester. Street Art: The Punk Poster in San Francisco, 1977-1981. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1981.

Livingstone, Karen. Essential Arts and Crafts. London: V&A Publications, 2005.
Make magazine articles of note: Vol. 21 (Magic photo cube by Ken Wade, p. 136), Vol. 22 (Tameharu Nagata, Japanese street performer with storytelling cards [kamishibai] and snacks, p. 23; Brazilian artist Felipe Barbosa who makes sculpture out of recycled materials like soccer balls and firecrackers), Vol. 23 ("Walled Gardens vs. Makers" by Cory Doctorow, an excellent article that says precisely what DIY is about, p. 16, and American artist Theresa Honeywell, who knits over motorcycles, machine guns, handguns, p. 23); Vol. 24 (wooden buttons from tree branches by Kristin Roach p. 126)
Craft magazine
Arts & Crafts history website
MoMA | The Collection | Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. (Italian, 1876-1944)

(all photos by me, as usual, unless otherwise noted)

Resharpening Cutting-Edge Art

2011-08-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

Seeing the sepia-toned, collage-style wallpaper in the coffee store made me put down my hot chocolate for a moment. I loved it (both the drink and the wallpaper). From what I remember—this was a few years ago—the topics were postage and travel. The aesthetics were pleasing. Well, that ends that, I thought at the time. Can't make sepia-toned collage work anymore if it's showing up in a chain.

So it goes and maybe it's natural. Over and over artists move into ghost towns or low-rent districts, fix 'em up, do exciting things and…there goes the neighborhood. Expensive lofts are built advertising the arty feel, rents go up, artists are forced out. Art is parallel with life here. Artists create something, it's picked up by commercial media, splashed about willy nilly, and suddenly it's a cliché. The real cutting edge becomes a dull prop.

Is this, consciously or unconsciously, why some artists guard their "secret formulas?" I don't hear it often because those aren't the circles I chase around, but I have heard the response to the question, "How did you do that?" to be "I'm not sayin'." I see why they might conceal their methods, but I've always felt that sharing information is the best way to make it available for the right person to grab hold of it and do something terrific. Sometimes I'm just as satisfied to learn, share things as I learn or figure out, and move on.

But if I—you—they—didn't? Would the vibrant, new, cutting edge art hang on a little longer? Well, just look at that sentence again. Cutting edge can't exist forever. If we must hold onto the metaphor, a knife, even a great knife, always needs resharpening. So that is our task: to continue resharpening ourselves, our outlooks, our art so that it stays fresh and meaningful and inspiring.

The Book as Hourglass: Transforming Time

2011-08-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

I like to imagine that the three young people at the outside restaurant table have their heads bowed because they are all reading while waiting for their food. And maybe they are. But they aren't reading books. The world is in front of them, contained in tiny devices. Large or small, artist books, too, are able to open up a world, approach big subjects, broaden a view, expand a moment in time: what can make them work?

The activity of reading is usually solitary. The activity of making often is as well. Either way, the head is bowed in reverence to…what? There's that mystery again: the creative process, the things that inspire us, and where it all comes from. Imagine all that noise out there coming through a funnel with a filter—your filter—a way to make those large moments smaller so that a protest, a courtroom, seven dreams, or everything you saw on the street today make sense. And so you can make them into art: a story, poem, book, sculpture, orchestral work, play, video, comic—whatever medium you like. What would be cool is if you could take those large moments, fit them into the art, and then have the viewer/listener experience that largeness again. The book doesn't have to be bigger than your head but the concepts can be.

Another way to do this is to start with the small, then connect to the large (mentioned in this related post and this one). We rented a Polish film the other night called Big Animal that was seemingly about a camel that appears in a small town and the childless couple who adopt it, but turns out to be about something larger: intolerance and fear. The film has no villains, yet it has conflict and heart. Each person is made up of emotional and intellectual shades of grey—perhaps appropriate since this 2000 film is in black and white. The film takes you from the small problem of one couple to the larger problems of the world. A moment in time, expanded, possibly exploded.

An intriguing essay, "The Beaten Path" by Carlo McCormick in the excellent book Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art & Street Culture takes up the back and forth, push and pull between the larger background of history, particularly art history, and the personally experienced, current moment. In his dynamic, hard-driving prose he shows how we yearn for an earlier time, disregard it, and/or rebel against it. When do we draw on what we have experienced in the past or what others have experienced or made and how do we make it relevant now? Chris Johanson, one of the artists whose work is shown in the book, has a piece in a monograph where he has painted the words, "This conceptual art is about human connections that can happen between people and how important it is to be in the moment with your people." Johanson's work deals with those interactions between people that are timeless, yet are depicted in his current style: paintings on boxes and walls, whole cities created from painted cardboard. His work also provides commentary on life today: one installation contained a "nice" store, "Nice Store / The store that treats people like people / that have individual needs."

Ultimately, my ideal book takes you in with your head bowed and back out again with an expanded mind. An hourglass where the sands change: the book is that narrowing of attention for a brief time that causes a thought to linger, transformed, as another world sifts and shifts into view.

Antenna, 2007

photo by Sibila Savage

More Inkjet Printing: Cloth, Paper & Gel Skin

2011-08-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Last post I tried out the non-porous digital ground so I could print on a piece of cloth (in this case a "book pelt"). Here are the next tries on the cloth and on the gel skin I mentioned previously. To alter inside pages, I also tried out artist's tape to mask words and masking fluid through a stencil to create a shape.

For the cloth, I used a dampened cotton swab and blurred out some of the hard edges of the photos after they were printed and before I sprayed the images with the archival varnish.

I made the gel skin from self-leveling clear gel poured onto a piece of disposable palette paper, which I had painted first with a little gold interference fluid acrylic. The gel pooled like glue, then dried clear after two days. I applied the non-porous digital ground on top of the dried skin and let it dry for a day. The palette page had to be cut down to printer size, but the skin remained stuck to the palette page to print. I then proceeded with the printing, drying, spraying, and drying as before.

Top left: Daniel Smith watercolor ground painted on cloth. (It works, but it leaves brushstrokes and texture; the Golden matte digital ground would probably work better.)
Top right: masking fluid through a stencil (vaguely visible)
Bottom left: artist's tape to mask words
Bottom right: gel skin coated with non-porous digital ground

Taped and printed. The top right paper got jammed in the printer because it fed diagonally by mistake, but it left an interesting image anyway that happened to enhance the content.

Clockwise from top left: gel skin (still on the palette paper), masking fluid, watercolor ground, artist's tape.

All tape and masking fluid removed. You can peel the gel skin from the palette page now or spray it first.

Gel skin resting on dark background. Notice that the interference gold acrylic shows up very well here. If you make several skins please note that they will stick together or stick to almost anything else even when they are dry. Put pieces of the palette paper or aluminum foil between them to store. If you are planning a project with the gel skin, prepare it at least three days before you will need it.

To mat the gel skin or to use it as a window in a book cover, cut holes in two 4-ply museum boards and sandwich the gel skin between them.

Cover the boards or paint them with acrylic paint first if you like.

You can position and reposition the gel skin on one of the boards. Add a shim of extra paper to even out the surface (where there is no gel skin) before you attach the second board.

Adhere all with any kind of gel medium. The skin is now suspended.

Creating a board book with these layers, putting text behind the skin, printing text on the skin—these new tools open up excellent possibilities for enhancing message and meaning.

Inkjet Printing on Book Pelts & Cloth

2011-08-11T08:50:00.000-07:00

If it prints, I'm interested in it. If it transfers, that's cool, too. If I can make a book with it, awesome. I attended a free two-hour demo at the Blick store on transfer and printing techniques that use inkjet printers. The demo was given by Nina Deckert (pronounced Nine-a), an artist and rep for Golden Acrylics (no relation), and I was inspired to try out those particular processes because they use printing, transferring, and I can use them in bookmaking.

The newest techniques to me were the making of gel skins and the applying of a digital medium to unusual materials for inkjet printing. The gel skins are transparent and can be applied (with acrylic medium) on top of paintings, book covers, or wrapped around three-dimensional objects so that the painting, book cloth, colors, textures, or substrate material shows through. Make one with just acrylic paints or colors, or brush on a clear gloss digital ground, tape it to a piece of paper, and run it through the inkjet printer. A great, detailed article about the gel skins is on the Golden website in their Just Paint newsletter archives: #20 "Technology Therapy: Overcoming the Fear" by Patti Brady.

This is not scary. This is just about painting one plain coat. And taping something to a piece of paper. And using your inkjet printer in a normal way. (And inkjet only, please.)

The digital medium allows you to print on just about any flexible, thin surface. Nina showed various uses for the Digital Grounds, which come in Gloss, Matte (white), and for Non-Porous Surfaces like foil papers, Mylar, and for the gel skins. Gloss is good if you want to see the color or material through the image, such as for line drawings. White is best on dark backgrounds or if you want an image in the midst of a heavy pattern. The ground nicely adds a slight stiffness to the gel skin or cloth. Nina said you can also use the non-porous ground on porous surfaces, and since I got a free sample of the non-porous I decided to try it out with two of my waiting "book pelts."

Use a disposable palette page, aluminum foil, silicon release paper, polypropylene sheet protectors/dividers, or polyethylene as a work surface (not acrylic plexiglass). Brush the ground onto the cloth, hang it up to dry (mine took 4 hours on a foggy morning).

Tape it to a piece of standard printer paper with low-tack artist's tape.

Make sure there aren't any loose areas on the cloth that will bunch up. Use a little double-sided tape if necessary.

Run it through and let it dry.

Spray it with one or two light coats of the archival spray varnish and let dry (in the afternoon sun it took only a few minutes although the directions say 24 hours). The digital grounds are water soluble so once they are painted on the surface, run through the inkjet printer and dried, they must be sprayed or they will not be permanent. As per Nina's recommendation, I used the Archival Spray Varnish, which also protects against UV light, to fix the images. It has a strong initial smell, so use it outside. The odor goes away in an hour or so.

In this case, I backed the cloth afterwards. I spread wheat paste on Velin Arches and smoothed the cloth on top of the paste, which worked very well. The sun was strong and warm that afternoon so it didn't take long to dry and I could cover the boards in just a few minutes. Instructions for mixing wheat paste and backing cloth are on pages 21-22 of Making Handmade Books.

Cover a board*. For a book or portfolio, use a second piece of backed cloth for the back board.

Here on the left, only the boards are covered, awaiting the book block. Background is acrylic ink painted Tyvek.

Right: Bound book with light tan Nideggen paper inside. Turns out to be very sturdy.

(Click on each to see larger image.)

Printing on a lighter cloth or using the matte white digital ground would probably give even better results. Definitely worth more experimentation. And the thought of printing on foil origami paper is intriguing, too. If you print on Mylar you can do a transfer technique onto a large piece of dampened printmaking paper. More to come…

Just for your interest: Nina gives her clear and informative presentations in many art-supply stores. Also, the Golden paint company has various workshops given by their working artist representatives: some free, some not. You may be able to find a schedule here.

*Bookmakers: I partially covered each board separately as you might for a quarter cloth bound book. I glued three strands of embroidery thread for bookmarks to the book block spine before casing in. Various instructions in my how-to books:

"variation" up until "a" for Covering Separate Boards in Expressive Handmade Books, pages 127-128
Hardcover Portfolio up until Step 11 in Creating Handmade Books, pages 130-131
Hard Cover: Multiple Signature in CHB, pages 118-119 or Making Handmade Books, pages 224-225; or Case Binding: Flat Spine in MHB, pages 213-214
Case Binding in EHB, pages 130-133
Attaching the Book Block in MHB, page 215

Lynda Barry: Pursuing a Vision

2011-08-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

We take classes for different reasons. We may attend intent on learning a skill, meeting new people, getting feedback, checking out a new community, or just having the time and space to do something we love. The chemistry of the class is unpredictable; we have signed up separately, but we hope we will all be compatible. We can research the instructor, but we still don't know what s/he will be like with this class and with these people. If we are jumping in cold we can evaluate the class based on a few observations:

Are we encouraged to pursue our own visions or the instructor's vision?
Is the class process- or product-oriented?
Do the exercises open our minds and inspire us or shut them down and block us?

A couple years ago I picked up a book that inspired me by Lynda Barry. What It Is was published in 2008 by Drawn and Quarterly Press, and I found it answered affirmatively to the three questions, above, in a visual (nearly overstimulating) way with collagelike pages. I brought it to an educator's group where it was met with mixed reactions. One person was horrified because she felt the aesthetic was messy and she didn't want her students to think that was okay to make things like that in her class. While I could see her point, I thought that the aesthetics might be the start of an interesting discussion. I felt that the book was much deeper and that the ideas supported the creative choices. In an interview Barry said:

I just wanted to make it so that when you started to flip through the pages you just had this itchy urge to make something, and I wanted to make both those books completely by hand and to use stuff that you could just get at the corner store. They're all made with scissors and Elmer's Glue and some paper from the trash.

The creative process is messy.

And Barry is all about process. This particular book draws from journals, sticky notes, paintings, personal stories and children's writing and artwork from the archives of the Mitchell family, one of whose members had been a school teacher in the 1920s. Barry asks many questions, such as "What is an Idea?" and "What is an Image?" "What Makes Something Meaningful?" "Why Write By Hand?" and "Where are Images Found?" She is interested in play and what children and grown-ups do when they make art/write.

The pages are numbered and the book has four color-coded sections:

periwinkle: What It Is; this is the bulk of the book that asks questions and tells stories.
salmon: Activity Book "contains some of the excercises [sic] we use in class to help us find images and follow them as they take form" (138).
light green: Let's Make Writing a "do it yourself writing kit" (174) She gives suggestions for making a "word bag" and a "picture bag" and ways to use them.
pumpkin: Notes on Notes; she keeps a pad of paper next to her main work so she can doodle and keep her hands in motion while she is thinking (190).

One of my favorite pages (145) is titled "Now Let's Turn Around Inside of This Image." She says that "An Image is a Location." This idea makes me focus on what I'm seeing in my head and then go there. I love the idea of looking around an image or place in my head.

If you find a copy of this book, take some time with it. Go through it about three or four times. If you can focus on one aspect each time the book can be inspirational rather than overwhelming. Look at all the pictures. Then go back and read it. Then see if you can understand the order and what you might take away from it for yourself. You don't have to make work like hers. Think of the book and her voice in it as a nature guide pointing out a trail.

An article, "Inside a Master Class: Breath, Punctuate, Forget Led Zeppelin" by Erik Piepenburg in the NYTimes touched on learning and teaching. In the article actor Raúl Esparza said essentially that the master class is to help someone improve. Actress Betty Buckley suggested that teachers are like coaches and guides, that a master class is like "a tuneup." Both sounded supportive, ready to nurture an individual's dream.

So, this is what I'm looking for in teachers. Coaches, people who want to help me be more ME rather than more THEM. I think Lynda Barry gets at that in her book, and she gratefully thanks her own teachers in the process.

Interview with Lynda Barry by Jesse Thorn
KQED interview
Lynda Barry has recently written another book—this one about drawing called Picture This.

Start with Pencil, 2005

photo by Sibila Savage

Everything Matters, Now Compromise

2011-08-03T20:42:00.000-07:00

Compromise is in the air. I can't pretend otherwise; let's see how it applies. Here I am moving along, creating something, and without warning I have to put on the brakes. Decision time. I have to make a choice which may be miniscule or enormous—either way it will affect my progress and the piece as a whole. It's a bit confusing to think that everything matters, that I may have to compromise, let something go, give something up.

Let's look at a visual chart of choices to consider while designing a book. Hang in there with me a minute.

Original desires are in yellow.

Problems are in red.

Decisions are in blue.

Let's say I want to make multiple copies of a handmade book on yellow paper and it has some kind of text. Now, notice how the original concept changes depending on the choices. These are hypothetical problems, examples to show what might happen. The green boxes exhibit four different outcomes.

Possible outcomes:

Left: sidebound book with thin paper, doubled, printed as I wanted it, but it won't open flat.

Right: accordion fold book with thick paper, printed as I wanted it, but it won't be yellow.

Bottom Left: one handmade copy, and multiple facsimiles, available at a lower cost to the readers.

Bottom Right: one handmade book or very small edition of handmade books, higher priced.

So you can see that all of the choices matter, but I may end up making a book that is different from the book I had in mind. In some way, it just might be better.

Another possibility is that I spend the time and make a large edition by hand.

A framework by Eli Goldratt that is used in business and engineering, known as the "triple constraint," involves problemsolving, and through it, compromise. One example is: "Good, fast, cheap: pick two." If you examine what we have looked at, you can see that our choices lead to those as well: binding (how the book handles/quality), labor (production time), cost of materials. Quality, time, cost. Still, we only get two. Something's gotta give. The choices all matter; they just aren't always easy.

Book Pelts & Covering Boards

2011-07-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

Lizard's Snake Suit, 1996

I started thinking about the many effects you can get when you cover boards with different materials. By boards I am talking about either 4-ply museum board or book board (also known as Davey board or binder's board). Sometimes the covering material is too thin, in which case you use wheat paste and attach a strong and thin backing paper to it (I use mulberry paper). I backed regular cloth for Lizard's Snake Suit. Sometimes the material isn't the color you want, and so you paint it. We will look at book cloth, painted cloth, painted paper, painted Tyvek, repurposed book cloth, and re-used and flattened aluminum cans. On the way, I'll give you some links to materials.

Ram's Horns, 2001

New book cloth can be found in small pieces at art-supply stores like Blick or Paper Source. A wider selection and larger pieces needed for boxes or editions can be ordered from Campbell-Logan Bindery: they are efficient and nice and they carry the more finely woven Japanese book cloths. Another interesting selection may be found at Hiromi Paper. Using new book cloth makes your book look, well, new. The cloth has no history to it and does not show your hand, so it's up to you and your project to decide if that is the clean, traditional, and minimalist look you want. Yes, projects talk.

Spotted One Day, 2009

Paint the book cloth with acrylic paints and gesso (Ram's Horns, for example) if you want to change the color or add texture or your own mark to the cover. You can paint muslin or other cotton cloths, too, but you may need to add a backing sheet when the cloth is dry. Be aware that thick layers of acrylic paint will remain tacky forever, so use the paints sparingly, add water, or mix with gesso, which doesn't stick. (See the Eva Hesse post for a photo of my painted cloth book.) If you need to back the cloth, please see instructions on pages 21-22 in Making Handmade Books. For a pattern or image, print linoleum blocks on the cloth (Spotted One Day). You can also piece cloth for a patchwork cover, add beadwork, machine sew, or handstitch on book cloth before you wrap the boards with it. This method definitely adds your style and hand to the project and creates a durable cover.

Shoulder Blades of Grass, 2006

If you want to paint paper to cover boards, I recommend Velin Arches, formerly called Arches Text Wove. This paper is 100% cotton and is thin enough for the turn-ins, but strong enough to withstand inks and glue. Use acrylic inks on the paper. See my book Painted Paper for a variety of painting techniques (Shoulder Blades of Grass has acrylic ink painted paper covers and a book cloth spine) Acrylic inks are liquid and come in one-ounce bottles. I use Daler-Rowney FW acrylic inks. Australians, I recommend Matisse inks. Painting paper also adds your style and your hand to the project.

Demystifiying Art, 2011

To give your paper a marbled look without actually marbling the paper, you can use Tyvek and acrylic inks. The Tyvek is made from polyethylene fibers which takes the ink in a variegated way. You can buy Tyvek envelopes at office-supply stores like Office Depot, save envelopes that are sent to you, or buy it in a roll from Talas. Using Tyvek and ink gives the work a swirly, romantic quality, and can make it look old or like cloth. For my model Demystifying Art I used my old friend, Antelope Brown.

Book Pelts, 2011

During the workshop I taught with Lisa Kokin in July, I noticed that Carolyn Batchelor had some interesting looking cloth with her. She kept it rolled up and tied with another scrap. I guessed it was hand-dyed. When I asked her about it she said she tore off the cloth from discarded books, soaked it, then scraped off the glue and whatever cardboard was still attached. The dye will run, she said, and you can paint with it. Carolyn uses the pieces as collage material; her covers show all the edges. When I got home, since I had some old covers leftover from the workshop, I went through the soaking process with the cloth. I mentioned this to a friend who called them "book pelts." When I eventually back them and print on them, the faded cloth will give the book cover a mysterious and worldly look.

Pop Art Journals, 2011

My friend and colleague Michael Henninger of RatArt Press used aluminum cans to cover boards in 1992 for his book Beer, Girls. For the 2009 publication, Eco Books by Terry Taylor, Michael contributed the project "Six-Pack Book" (30). I adapted it for my "Pop Art Journals." Using the colorful graphics designed for everyday use is a fun way to play with color and ties you to the present moment. Each of these has a bookcloth spine, endbands, and a ribbon bookmark.

Paper bags, handmade paper, plastic bags, beeswax, felt: so many more options to explore. Underneath, all the boards are the same, but their attire influences how we view them.

For more about this subject, see the April 25, 2011 post "Materials & Hidden Meaning."

Content Ideas: Do Sit Down

2011-07-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

You are holding paper and looking for book ideas, something to work with between the covers. One way to find meaningful content is to stay in one place long enough for it to come to you. Something will happen. You have to be still. Do sit down.

Outside, on the grass. Bring a blanket to sit on if you like, but sit near the edge. Look at every blade of grass. Watch for movement: bugs, neighborly cats, knots falling out of knot holes in a fence. Listen for birds, trucks, voices. Smell the air, the twigs, the blanket. Make a note, list, or sketch of how you feel or what the place is like when you first sit down. Add a new page when something changes in or outside of you.

Outside, on a bench. Maybe a park. Maybe a sidewalk outside a café. Look at the cracks on the sidewalk or the wood chips or squirrels under the picnic table. Watch the people. Listen to their conversations. Write down the fragments or what you mis-hear or misinterpret. See if you can watch one person do one thing from beginning to end. Notice how strangers interact or don't. Make a note, list, or sketch of what the place is like or how you feel when you first sit down. Add a new page when something changes in or outside of you.

Inside, by a window. Maybe your room. Maybe a library. Watch for movement inside or outside: drama between birds, dogs, cats, clouds, or people, perhaps. Heighten your senses by becoming aware of your body in the space. Make a note, list, or sketch of how you feel or what the room is like when you first sit down. Add a new page when something changes in or outside of you.

Inside, at a desk with no distractions. You have only your memory, the films you play inside your head while you wait. What appears before you? Who? Make a note, list, or sketch of how you feel or what is floating into your mind. Look around inside. Listen, too.

Outside, walking. You are restless. Keep your focus outward. Keep your senses alert and aware. Movement might be in the form of cars, people, bicycles, trees. Make notes as you walk, or walk first, then sit down and make a note, list or sketch of how you feel or what is floating into your mind.

An event, however small, will happen here, there, here, again. You are looking for change.

Go Change, 2008

Reading: E.B. White, including, Essays by E.B. White, Points of My Compass, One Man's Meat
Viewing: the exquisite, painted field notebooks of Andie Thrams (Click on the link, then on the image there.)

Handwriting and Creative Writing

2011-07-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

When I taught bookmaking to kids several years ago, a Chinese-American mom came up to me with a question about writing. It took me a few moments to understand whether she meant the forming of words on a page, like handwriting, or creating narratives and poems, like creative writing. She seemed to mean both. The mom did not exactly say why she was unhappy, did not explain her feelings, but I could tell she was displeased. Later, I was able to understand that she felt troubled because of the importance of both art and writing in her cultural background. In the excellent catalogue for the 2006 exhibit Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art, Wu Hung writes about the deep connection:

…painters since the emergence of scholarly painting…have always played multiple roles in cultural production, not only as visual artists but also as poets, essayists, playwrights, and calligraphers. Their works often combine images and texts, and are subjects of both viewing and reading. After literati painting became the mainstream of Chinese art…the artistic persona implied in this practice grew into a standard model for all educated artists to follow.…two major forms of traditional painting—the handscroll and the album—are also used for writing and printing books…As a result of all thse factors, paintings and books have enjoyed a unique relationship in Chinese culture… (2)

The mom said that her son only liked to write on the computer. He wouldn't use pencil and paper. What did I think about this? My personal reaction was mixed; I spent much of my childhood teaching myself calligraphy, practicing handwriting, designing and redesigning my signature, practicing with my opposite hand and upside down, then later took calligraphy in high school and a Spencerian workshop as an adult. I like forming letters. But clearly the boy did not.

Thoreau, famous for his journals, wrote "It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write is not what interests us" (from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers).

The parents clearly tried to make writing interesting. The dad told me that he was a construction worker, that he brought a notebook with him to work, and that he wrote down what he did that day. He encouraged his son to write about his day, too, so that at night they could read the journals and talk about their day together. The dad was happy that his son wrote at all, so using the computer to write about his day didn't bother him.

The mom was certain that it was important to form the letters by hand. She felt it was better to write than to type. I finally said I was glad he was writing at all. But I didn't feel totally comfortable with my answer.

"Handwriting Skills Key to Helping Students Learn," a recent article by Julie Deardorff in my local paper, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune (June 15, 2011) reinforces the idea that greater learning is linked to handwriting. In one study at Indiana University, pre-school children were tested for brain activity after they had been exposed to letters. One group just practiced looking and saying the letters, the other group also practiced writing them. "After four weeks of training, the kids who practiced writing showed brain activation similar to an adult's." Another study, this one at the University of Ottawa, found that "The contact, direction and pressure of the pen or pencil send the the brain a message. And the repetitive process of handwriting 'integrates motor pathways into the brain,' said [Katya] Feder." It is possible that in the future, stylus and screen could be used for handwriting practice, but the immediate response of a pen or pencil, the sound, and the physical mark/groove on the paper cannot be duplicated. The stylus and screen are too far removed from the body.

And handwriting is very much an expression of the body and through it, nature, particularly Spencerian. In Handwriting in America: A Cultural History, Tamara Plakins Thornton writes "Spencer…claimed to receive inspiration for his letter forms from waves and clouds, pebbles and shells, sunbeams and flower petals" (62). I like that some handwriting was supposed to be connected to nature, that the spaces between the letters were supposed to resemble waves. Spencerian has a natural flow to it and is calming to practice. It's not easy and it takes much practice. For those and other reasons we are not teaching children Spencerian, but what if we taught handwriting when we taught natural history? Here are some of the tree letters: k l t . Here are the waves: u e a. Here are the birds: v w.…

The mom was right: something was missing. But the dad was right, too. Both fluent handwriting and fluent creative writing are important. But in order for each to be a joy rather than a chore, at the early grades perhaps the two should be separate activities. Practice handwriting for the love of the flowing letterforms, look at positive and negative space, curves and lines. Work with short phrases, poems, jokes, or haiku. For longer works, just getting the story out there is important. We don't want to set up obstacles when a child has an idea to express. Ultimately, in the upper grades, perhaps middle school, the two can gradually be combined. Art and writing as a single form, a concept our western culture has yet to embrace.

Spencerian is written with a pointed pen in an oblique pen holder. A wonderful instructional book by Michael R. Sull and Debra E. Sull is Learning to Write Spencerian Script. All supplies (nibs, penholders, McCaffery's ink or Pelikan 4001 ink, book) can be found at Paper and Ink Arts. Classes are available in Berkeley at Castle in the Air.

Happy Progress & the Philosopher's Stone

2011-07-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

While I can't claim to have found the philosopher's stone, I did discover that certain objects can be keys to getting started, to unlocking the creative process. Okay, so they don't transform ideas into gold, but still they are a kind of treasure. I felt a bit like Betty, the crow who not only uses tools but makes them to "obtain [something] out-of-reach."

Last spring, I was having trouble practicing my monologue. For some reason I just couldn't feel the character, could only recite the words, not act them. Acting definitely felt out-of-reach. The TA for the class suggested I focus on one area of my body, locate the monologue in my stomach, for example, and really feel it inside. I trusted him and believed that would work, but it didn't.

My friend told me that when she taught elementary school she found she could speak better when she held a pen in her hand. She didn't know why, but it seemed to ground her. She said that when she writes she also holds a pen, as if she were going to use it to write, but she types on her keyboard instead. She suggested I find something like that.

I took her advice. While I was practicing in my studio, I picked up some sandpaper. And a little rock. Practicing with the sandpaper and rock changed how I performed the monologue. I could focus on the rough sandpaper and the heavy rock. These were physical objects that reminded me where I was and that I was in my body: feeling the rough and heavy monologue. I had to have objects to transform. They became my tools.

The objects gave me the focal point, which allowed me to settle down and away from the swirling thoughts and possibly, anxieties that I couldn't pin down otherwise. I was able to keep my energy on the creative work itself—the monologue—and successfully performed it without hesitation and with a depth of spirit. I think this focus on an object can translate to art, writing, and other creative activities. The object may start out as unrecognized by the mind (I seemed to pick my two objects intuitively) and it may also change, depending on need. I'm keeping this in mind now, the idea of a grounding rock, pen, or other object that I can focus on that has certain qualities to inspire me, so that I can continue to carry on.

Graffiti Behind The Museum Doors & Beyond

2011-07-18T08:01:00.000-07:00

Whatever you think of it, graffiti is the ultimate merging of art and writing in an expressive form. Additionally, in the United States, it is a transgressive behavior. The work can be insightful, beautiful, disquieting, or ugly and can be viewed with awe, indifference, scorn, or fury. The viewer may make a judgment based on aesthetics, on personal beliefs, on morals or some mixture. I was in L.A. last week and definitely experienced a mixed reaction to the Art in the Streets exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. I was only able to see the downstairs works and what I saw was mostly spraypainted. (I am partial to wheatpaste postering, where the artist makes the large work elsewhere on paper then uses a roller to apply paste to the wall and smooth the poster onto it.) Context changes everything. Bringing the graffiti inside the museum doors made the art very strange, indeed.

MOCA presented the exhibit as a history of the form with many of the key players from major cities. I believe the artists and the artform deserve recognition, although I am not sure this was the best format. The show was overwhelming in scale, with several hidden gems. I liked the constructions made of old signage, the wall of doors and windows, the drumset and wall of stereo speakers with faces on them. Creepy but interesting was a nest made of telephone wire with three surveillance cameras attached to it. We stood in front of a stylized alphabet and took pictures of individual letters in order to spell friends' names, which made me feel a bit like I was at an amusement park. Perhaps that was the problem. All the place needed were graffitied funhouse mirrors. Even the bathroom stalls were painted (in pink letters and images). I'm all for humor, but what was the show's message, again?

The dark side was not neglected. One hallway simulated a dark alley with writing on the walls and a mannequin streetperson at the end. Another room had glow-in-the-dark painted graffiti. There were painted cars and recreated, gritty city blocks as well. The scope was broad and the show could easily be split in two: political, satire, dangerous, and content-heavy on the one hand and fun, bright, and playful on the other. In my short visit it is entirely possible that I missed something. A catalogue is available.

For a deeper look into the world of the artist, I felt that the Banksy film, real or hoax (sometimes fiction is more accurate) Exit Through the Gift Shop gave me a better picture. What the MOCA exhibit did for me was to heighten my awareness of the walls outside rather than inspiring me inside of them. I had an uncanny feeling as we left the building. Downtown Los Angeles has plenty of graffiti that is deemed illegal and instead of vaguely noticing it as usual, as we walked to the Metro stop I began hunting for it, studying it.

Most graffiti is created in cities and urban neighborhoods, often poor ones, and brings art out to a public that can't afford to go inside a museum, but there we just were and now we were outside again. Art inside. Art outside. Same, but different. Very strange. No catalogue out here.

The exhibit stirred up many questions. What about the women? (There were a couple, like Swoon—more of her work here—but the majority of work presented was by men.) How much does the element of danger figure into the exhiliaration of painting? How much does cultural heritage, political, or economic background figure into it? What if the artists got permission from the building's owner first? Would the painting lose its edge? Which is more important, the art or the transgression? Is it vandalism if the art is carefully done rather than hastily scribbled? We got off the Metro and from the parking lot we saw this painting (above left) neither worse nor better than what we had seen inside the museum.

The Obama poster by Shepard Fairey was in the exhibit, framed. I took this picture in Oakland, California in February 2008. Same, but different. I remember how excited I was at the time to see it on the streets.

Reviews of MOCA exhibit:
Huffington Post review.
L.A. Times review.
N.Y. Times article and here.
Information about Jeffrey Deitch, new Director of MOCA and his former projects.

On our drive from Downtown we saw graffiti on an overpass: "The median is the message." What would Marshall McLuhan do?

In London, a freshly painted Banksy image appeared in April and my wanderer took this picture just after the paint had dried. Later, she said, someone came and put plexiglass over it to preserve it. It seems that the definition of value varies, depending on the context, depending on who and what and where…