Multiples at Walker Art Center

My life has been a bit up and down lately, so I missed the opportunity to see the wonderful book arts event at the Walker last Saturday, called Multiples Mall.
But my favorite video-chronicler of the Twin Cities arts scene, 3-minute egg, caught up with them here.

Snow and show

I was planning on a visit to the Walker today to see their new artist's books exhibit Text/Messages but the snow is coming down too hard to go anywhere. (6" snowfall by evening is one prediction.) It's a lovely day to stay in, wrap packages and start Christmas baking.
Instead I can post some links to reviews and articles on the show:
StarTribune
links to Walker blogs here and here

Books from Penland #2

"Books have to work!" Bookgirl reminded me of this quote from Penland teacher Laura Wait and it's something I agree with completely. I don't want people to be afraid of my books. They need some visual guidance as to the way into them, the feeling that they're secure and won't fall apart and that they open well. For me books are about curiosity and exploration....you don't want to scare away the visitors!
The third structure we took up at Penland was the drum leaf binding (a structure created by Tim Ely). I had done it once in class with Sara Langworthy (who is a wonderful artist and terrific teacher), but was eager to try it again. It's a particularly elegant book: each page opens flat, but I also love how the book moves in your hand. Laura has done some fabulous books on gardens and I let myself be derivative of that work...the checkerboards and "trees" are similar to her images, but the colors were a surprise to us both! I also felt that the checkerboard "walk" gave the book a narrative, even if it was just an image. It's hard to see in these images, but there is text written into the paint on the bottom about my own garden. The book is 5 1/4 x 5 1/4".











Our final structure was a sewn boards binding with a concertina. We were heading towards our last days together and Laura was clear that none of these bindings were mandatory to do, but I had one more idea and wanted the experience so I dove in. The stitching on this binding is not difficult. What was most challenging for me was folding in the concertina around each section as we sewed (we used Moriki paper from Aiko's). Daniel Kelm is teaching the same structure at Garage Annex this summer and sums up the advantages of this structure very nicely:
"(the) concertina spine is ideal for accommodating the thickness of signatures of pages with fold outs, or material such as a photograph that is collaged onto the surface of the page. Another advantage of the non-adhesive concertina spine structure is that the book can open flat. "
The cover on this is not complete, but here's the interior of the book:














The background is acrylic/wheat paste, as is the rectangle (which is based on the golden ratio). The lines are drawn in acrylic ink with a chopstick and the "seeds" are water pastels. The book is 10"x 4 1/2".

Books from Penland #1

One of the key reasons I started this blog was to start a discussion around book arts. So it's time I posted my books from Penland. I'll do it in two chapters so they don't get too long.
I've been taking book arts classes for over 10 years and have happily been collecting new structures (ie, how to stitch, fold or paste a book) without risking any personal content. Those classes provided a welcome distraction from the stresses of my real work. But in the last few years, I knew it was time for a change.
I signed up for Laura Wait's class because I was attracted by her description of "using intuition and hand" to make painted pages...it was pretty clear that there were no blank pages allowed...and I wanted that challenge.
We started by drawing simple lines on large pages and then using wheat paste colored with acrylics to start painting. None of us really knew what we were doing, but it was time to let go and dive in. After painting 6 sheets on front and back, we went back and added another layer of paste/paint. When they were dry...and many of us were saying we had nothing (we liked) to work with...we cut them down into pages. And then magic did start to happen. What was dull or blah in a large size suddenly got interesting cut down. When we started to assemble the pages, it really started to make sense. Thoughout the session, anytime we had some open time, we were either painting new pages, stitching or adding additional layers to our pages with ink, pastels or colograph printing. We also used mylar extensively throughout the session: as a protective layer on our work surface, as pages in our books and to cut stencils from for additional images.
This is my first book, 10"h x 4" w. There is no text but I drew on the patterns of farms and fields from the air around Minneapolis for my inspiration. I used mylar stencils extensively throughout.













When you're at Penland, you don't want to play it safe, so I tried another color palette with my second book which used a sewn boards binding. This one is 7 1/2" x 5". The wheat paste/acrylic mixture can be worked with while still wet...in this case I used quite a bit of my own handwriting and let the paste "fall in" on the letters so that they're not completely legible. It was very liberating and I like the patterns it made quite well.












Tomorrow I'll post on the drum leaf binding and sewn boards with concertina.