11 November 08
Black Book
My latest exercise in bookbinding has been to make a black-papered book using Canson Mi-Tientes art paper. Each page is 5” high by 8” wide, good I suppose for nighttime landscapes.
The goodies available at Talas are starting to look very tempting.
2 November 08
Cooking, Carpentry, and Sewing
That’s how one of my classmates described the activities in the Bookbinding III class I took this weekend at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This time we only produced one book, but this was a large and complicated one, with 20 signatures, sewn endbands, and a split-board binding. The cooking bit was learning how to make wheat paste glue, for the carpentry we had to do lots of precise cuts with the board shear and guillotine, and the sewing of course was the signatures and the endbands, the latter being very finicky and difficult. I’ve now completed the introductory bookbinding series at SFCB so it’s time to start applying these skills. It would be nice to produce something other than blank books, so my next project might be to typeset some text from Project Gutenberg, print it up on a laser printer, and bind it as my very own book design. Imposition problems here we come.
24 October 08
In Praise of the Doodle
I’m a doodler. I admit it. If you talk to me on the phone, I will almost certainly reach for one of the several fountain pens within my field of view and start making marks on paper. Often they start out abstract, but usually resolve into something figurative. A flourish turns into a letter, which gets followed by another letter.
I make, and swap, Artist Trading Cards (ATCs). There are only two rules with these things: a) they must be 3.5” x 2.5” and b) they can’t be sold. A tiny canvas, a place to try a new medium or technique. I’ve been trading with calligraphers for a while, but recently have joined Swapbot to do one or two trades at a time with a much wider range of options.
It was on Swapbot that I found the call for the Doodle ATC. Go back through your pages and find doodles you’ve made and cut them out, it said. Don’t consciously try to doodle something. Send something you’d like to receive yourself.
Wow. I guess I must really have been on a fish kick over the summer.
19 October 08
Books Five and Six
They say that after you bind your first hundred books, you can consider yourself to be a practiced bookbinder. This weekend I took Bookbinding II down at the San Francisco Center for the Book where we made two more books, getting me to six total, learning how to do Bradel binding and to work with decorative papers. Pica meanwhile went down to San Francisco with me today and had a grand time touring the city, returning home with sock-knitting supplies!
15 September 08
Books Two and Three
I was inspired by our whirlwind course on binding a sketchbook three weeks ago to start taking the introduction to bookbinding series at the San Francisco Center for the Book. This weekend I went down to the Bay Area and took the Bookbinding I class. I made two books over yesterday and today, so including the one from three weeks ago, these are the second and third books I’ve ever made (at least of the sewn signature hardback book variety).
It’s very satisfying to hold and open a book that you’ve sewn and glued yourself. I’ve already signed up for Bookbinding II, and I think I will take Bookbinding III this fall as well.
9 September 08
Life and Death
This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you’ve got a good strong rope.
Every Dharma is known in the heart.
After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death. – Hsu Yun
I found this on the always surprising, always provocative Whiskey River this morning. I’ve been thinking more about fairyism and the meaning, and purpose, of art. About how Danny Gregory says drawing every day saved his life after a life-and-death event.
I am such a dabbler. A butterfly. I bring people together, give them food, give them work I’ve done, here, have a mudpie, it’s made with love. For the universe, but you’re here, as a deserving member of the universe. You have it. Have a poem, have a book I made, have a painting.
I have lived my life as though this generous spirit somehow let me off the hook of going to the dark places. But we are about to enter some dark places, whoever gets elected here in the US, and it will take only the most supreme pollyannas or the wealthy beyond measure to deny them (they may hope to be dead before New York is 12 feet underwater after the melting ice caps, because if not, they won’t escape either). The question will no longer be “am I really an artist” but “am I really a human being.” There will be tests. Will I be ready?
Here’s what I’m trying to work out, inspired by the likes of her and her and her: how to find wisdom in the dark places. How to be open to it even when it’s terrifying and seems hopeless. How the marks on paper or wood or metal or stone help to make sense of things when there is no sense to be made.
How, in other words, to have art save your life. Or at least contain, direct, preserve your humanity until you die.
5 September 08
Miss Your Forms From the Trace of Fairyism
This was a sign seen at the Beijing Airport, according to Steven Skaggs, who has a piece in the latest edition of Letter Arts Review. (The sign presumably was a little more clear in Chinese.) Although it’s hard to tell exactly what it means to Chinese travellers returning to the big city, for Skaggs, it’s a call to reject the superficial and pretty in Western calligraphy. The exuberant happy colors. The flourishes and hands that bear no relation to the content. The effete. Trite sentiment. Calligraphy as commodity.
Having been following the sudden intensification of the political landscape in the US, I can’t say I’m finding this call to darkness all that unappealing. I am moved by powerful art, which calligraphy can be, when it’s not concerning itself with writing out Desiderata or “I am not there, I do not sleep.” I wish I had the time and the skill to devote myself to a massive piece that would somehow make some kind of difference in this campaign. Because, no offense to 8-year-old girls, fairyism isn’t going to cut it. This needs to be more of the kind of thing I spend my time doing… I was pleased to see Skaggs including, in his searing call to authenticity, a request that people write their own stuff, not just quote the now hackneyed voices of others.
26 August 08
Optique
A course description which came in a flyer today has me intrigued:
Halloween Optique. An optique is a wondrous, seemingly flat object that expands to reveal layer upon layer of scenes containing little surprises. Inspired by two antiques in his collection that date to the 1700s, [the instructor] has built optiques that have made their way into very prestigious collections. In this class, he’ll show you how to create a Halloween version.
I’m not intrigued enough to take the course, which is being taught at this Berkeley chichi writing and crafts store called Castle in the Air (their website is all Flash-based, about what you’d expect from this place), but would someday like to see one of these artifacts. Searching on the term brings up lots of links to antiquarian print dealers. Here’s a fuller description from one of these:
Vues d’optiques were hand-colored etchings and engravings intended to be viewed through a convex lens. The devices, known variously as zograscopes, optiques, optical machines and peepshows, were an optical entertainment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The form emerged in 1740, and engravings were published mainly in London, Paris and Augsburg for roughly the next 100 years, until better stereoscopic technology supplanted it. Vues d’optiques were rendered in high-key color and dramatic linear perspective, which enhanced the illusion of three-dimensionality when viewed through the lens. According to the Getty Research Institute, street performers would set up viewing boxes with a series of prints giving a pictorial tour of famous landmarks, dramatic events and foreign lands. Some vues d’optique also had parts of the scenes cut out and the openings backed with translucent papers so that when the print was backlit, it appeared as an illuminated night scene. They most commonly depicted landmarks in large European cities or the Holy Land.
24 August 08
A Bit More About Books and Binding
A bit more about the bookbinding course we took yesterday… Dominic Riley’s workshop is in the Lake District, not too far from where William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived for a while. Dominic was asked by the Wordsworth Trust to restore some of his notebooks. Wordsworth was editor of the local paper and had access to all kinds of machinery for binding, but after taking them apart, it was clear that the notebooks had been made at home: they were rough-cut, had no formal backing, and didn’t need a press. They were super-sturdy, though: they open flat and can take a lot of pounding in the constant drizzle. The Ideal Sketchbook.
Who knows if these books were made by Dorothy on their kitchen table? Dominic suspects they were: in his words, “Wordsworth didn’t seem to do much.” He and Dorothy walked, though. (The results of one of these walks was a poem called the Leech Gatherer, about which Seamus Heaney has much to say, and which has put me in a slightly more charitable frame of mind toward the Lake District Luminary, but I’m still betting he wasn’t sewing signatures on tapes at the kitchen table.)
Running between the I-80 traffic and the wedding I found in the bottom of a drawer the first sewn book I ever made, sometime in the early 1990s in Cambridge, Mass. I took it with us to the wedding and used it to record blessings offered, at the request of the now newlyweds. I filled it. I can’t imagine a better use for this book…
24 August 08
Take Me Out To The Wedding
Back just now from Karen and Chris’s wedding, a wonderful event ending a long day — Pica’s birthday — which we celebrated by going to San Francisco to take a course at the San Francisco Center for the Book on making the ideal sketchbook (patterned after a creation of Dorothy Wordsworth) taught by master bookbinder Dominic Riley. The drive back from SF took longer than usual because we got stuck in traffic from the Giants’ game but that was in keeping with there turning out to be a baseball motif in the wedding, the ceremony ending with a chorus of “Take me out to the ballgame”.
Congratulations, Chris and Karen!