9 November 04
Sketch Until You Crawl
That is the idea behind the first World Wide SketchCrawl. On Sunday November 21 spend the entire day in a sketching marathon. (From Danny Gregory.)
And if you need to find something to write with for this endeavor, have a look at Glenn’s Pen Page, with information about pens, pen stores, companies, and ink.
25 October 04
Letters to Anywhere
The second workshop we took yesterday was entitled “Letters to Anywhere,” an intriguing title we never seemed quite to cover in the class…
We DID all have to write to someone whose face appeared on a postcard, of which there were many, or imagine the person on the postcard writing to someone else on a different postcard (and on and on; you get the gist). We constructed different envelope models for correspondence, things you can actually put in the mail. I liked Karen’s insistence on the ephemeral, on eschewing the sacred archival that we may have learned elsewhere. Have fun, she says. And SHARE it. It doesn’t have to last; it has to get mailed.
Ideas that came up on the drive home: Write a letter to a place. Write a LOVE letter to a place. Write a letter to yourself at a younger (or older) age. Write to a fictional character in your place, or a place you know well.
It strikes me that this blog is an ongoing letter to anywhere, actually: it’s certainly a letter to many places at once. So, anywhere: how are you? I am fine. Wish you were here…
24 October 04
Landscape In Brown Paper Stock
We packed up Nellie and set off early in the morning for our workshop today at the San Francisco Center for the Book. SFCB is in a convenient part of San Francisco: close enough to the freeway to reach it quickly provided you have a map, but far enough from downtown so that there’s no problem parking. Our teacher, Karen Holden, is a poet as well as a book artist, and we did several writing exercises in addition to making a couple of quick books. She believes in letting the outside world flow into one’s writing as easily as possible. In our first exercise she primed this by randomly mentioning phrases to incorporate into the middle of a free writing exercise. Here’s a bit from mine:
The river sits under the fog, cleaning the air with thoughts floated up by fish. The field is a brown book, the furrows lines of type upon which is written the leavings of the plow.
We then made a landscape book, bound together with a simple stitch. Pica of course makes books like this all the time, but I’m much newer at such things, and found it to be a lot of fun. Above is my little California landscape book: our instructor gave us wonderful paper to work with.
23 October 04
Multiples of Monoprints
In preparing for our Sense of Place workshop in San Francisco tomorrow, I’ve been going through all my potential “items for collage.” I came across some monoprints I did in 2001 or 2002; lots of dark renditions of Grendel sneaking up on feasting vikings, I now see. (I was reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf at the time.) Lots of abstract monoprints also—I scanned some today and printed them to use as possible book covers.
Since I don’t know what exactly we’ll be doing, it’s hard to plan what to bring. I’m bringing far too much.
In baseball news, the first game of the World Series was won by the Red Sox tonight, but they are clearly not going to make it easy on themselves (or us). They blew an early 7-2 lead and the game was tied at 9 going into the ninth inning. Mark Bellhorn’s two-run homer took care of business, but this is cutting it way too fine (and running through an entire pitching staff every game).
12 October 04
Auto Mechanics With Fine Binding
So I’m taking this auto maintenance class, which is sort of silly because I have a sparkling engine, inside and out. But Nicole calls up from North Carolina and asks if Phil and Phillip are taking the class—she’s one of the more-than-once crowd, as are they. Yes, I say. Well, she says, Phil is a book restorer. You should talk.
So while other people roll around the filthy floor of a high school shop changing their oil, Phil and I go into the intricacies of hand-tooled leather, the Bay Area book arts scene in the 60s, and the lamentable lack of a letterpress in Davis. This was the last place I’d expect to have a conversation like this; it beats talking about the Red Sox and their performance tonight…
4 October 04
Writing Words
I’ve been working on a display for the UC Davis Campus Community Book Project which kicks off next Monday with recollections about the Rodney King beatings and riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers who were caught in an act of horrific brutality on a neighbor’s video. The display brings together many voices, too, remembering that time.
It would have been very easy to do all this on a page layout program (I use Adobe InDesign) but I’ve been writing them out, longhand. In different longhands, actually. It has made the process much more meaningful for me as I struggle to understand different points of view, to come to terms with my privilege as a white person. There’s a meditative element in doing calligraphy. I slow way down, something I’m generally not very good at. It opens many doors.
This task is miniscule compared to the calligraphic event of the century (actually, of the half-millennium): the St. John’s Bible, which is currently underway by a team of calligraphers and illuminators under the direction of Donald Jackson, the scribe royal. Jackson came up with a new hand for this 7-volume project, a kind of loose Carolingian-foundational with an Italic edge, excellent for doing long patches of text (which, obviously, the Bible is). His team of world-class calligraphers has been working at his scriptorium in Monmouth, just over the Welsh border, since 2000; they’ve completed volume three. I’ve been studying this hand a bit and while I can’t claim to have mastered it yet, it’s definitely working even in its very imperfect form.
Of particular interest to me is that a local natural history illustrator, Chris Tomlin, has included Minnesota flora and fauna in this version (St. John’s Benedictine Monastery is in Minnesota). This is a bible of place. I’m eager to see it—looks like a trip to Minnesota is in my future at some point.
Donald Jackson urges people to get out their pens and write passages of the bible out in longhand in order to come to a closer understanding of the beautiful words. Having spent a mere weekend doing this, although they’re different words, I’m starting to get it. Perhaps this is why writers of graffiti feel such power?
8 September 04
Name That Typeface
I once designed, for a final project in design school, a board game called “Name That Typeface.” Game pieces were type slugs set as their face (so Garamond was set in Garamond, Electra in Electra); there were cards with questions referring to type specimens; I even got a local binder to foil stamp the “spine” of the board.
Type’s changed a lot in the years since I finished school, and I struggle now to name some of the more trendy ones, even if they’re used all over the place. But designing type is an exciting field and there’s some wonderful work going on. It must be a great time to take a typography class.
I haven’t signed up for one of those, but for an online calligraphy class (Roman Majuscules, fiendishly difficult and something I’ve never taken enough time to learn properly). I’ve never taken an online class (our teacher lives in Melbourne, so this should be interesting). It starts in November; I’ll let you know how it goes!
3 September 04
From Pixels To Digital Dust
We are becoming digital pack rats. I’ve been consistently keeping my sketchbook journal for three months now, and am trying to sketch something, anything at all, in it every day. I’ve gravitated much more towards sketching than digital photography, and one of the reasons is the vast amounts of digital clutter a digicam produces. It’s so easy to take 100 Mb of images in a single outing with a digicam, and since storage is so cheap then keep 90% of the images. It doesn’t take very many sessions to end up with thousands of images, and a cataloguing and digital preservation problem. Sketchbooks stay nice, small, and self-contained, have a longer potential lifespan, and are lots of fun to browse through.
(From The Shifted Librarian)
2 September 04
Patterns
The patterns above are how I learned to write. It was at a British primary school in Madrid in the early sixties—somebody must have heard of Alfred Fairbanks or something. We had to trace the patterns in pencil. Nobody made sure we did it right, like downstrokes instead of up or right strokes instead of left, or that we held the pencil lightly. Everyone’s handwriting turned out terribly, including mine (I’m an adult convert to Italic).
Across from me at the squat formica’d table was a girl who struggled more than everyone else. She had a huge head and her tongue was always in sight. I forget her name—I’ll call her Julia—but I can’t forget the way she smelled or the creative mess she made of her tracing paper.
Statistically, Julia is long dead, victim of an extra chromosome and a culture ill-equipped to deal with her. I hope she felt at least some connection with the little folks at her red formica table that ay as we all pushed graphite around more or less haphazardly. Some of us got a second chance…
29 August 04
Rendering Dimension
We all drew as children. The question Peter Steinhart asks in The Undressed Art: Why We draw is why we stop.
Many give up because they think they aren’t good enough, or it doesn’t make any sense when there are so many other things to do. But Steinhart thinks it’s what makes us uniquely human.
The camera, and now the computer, have played their part in destroying drawing as a discipline, yet they have nothing on abstract expressionism. Generations have lost the skill of drawing.
And yet: life drawing classes and studios are filled to capacity.
Reading this book makes me ache to get back into a dusty room with twenty other people, charcoal dust swilling around, looking at a human figure and puzzling how to get it down on paper. I think I’ll try the Davis open studio this fall. If I’m no good it doesn’t matter: there’s nothing else that can get me to see as hard as that.
This post is the 500th on Feathers of Hope, eighteen months and counting.