While I focus on bookbinding I consider myself a multimedia artist and I work in other in a variety of other forms and mediums. When I first stumbled across the MiniMini call at Wet Paint I began by thinking about what might be the best medium to use. Jes at Wet Paint had brought in some 4″ X 4″ canvases so my first thought was a painting. The more I thought about it though the less I liked that idea. I wanted to create something that had some depth to it and something people could touch. I designed and bound a coptic stitched book; the covers were made from walnut burl and it had four signatures made from 90 Lb. Fabriano Artistico. As it came together though, I found I wasn’t crazy about it. The plan was to print images of beach art on the pages and create a recess in the front cover and make a small pile of stacked rocks out of Polymer Clay. The small rocks recessed into the cover were meant to echo some of the beach art images but at the end of the day the whole thing just seemed really boring to me.
Some time ago a conversation with a friend brought us to the idea of the middle-age haiku. I write them periodically and I thought this might be a good way to display them. I constructed 4″ X 4″ box out of red oak and inlaid the sides with some walnut to give make it a little more dynamic. I painted the inside of the box with black gesso; I was going for the tacky metaphor of the mid-life crisis and the way in which many feel their life has been sucked into a black hole. I finished the exterior with tung oil and wax. I printed twelve of my haikus onto a creme colored Lokta paper, rolled them up into small scrolls and tied each with artificial sinew.
