Strange Journals
Ramblings on Bookbinding, Photography, Journaling and ArtWild Thing
I like the work of Portland based artist Theo Ellsworth. Theo lives in a world of creatures, monsters and people who can morph into their worst fears and intentions. I wish his work was more accessible in my area but more often then not, I have to be content with just reading his blog at Art Capacity. I’ve watched him draw and the intensity and focus he puts into his work amazes me.
Last month he wrote about some wood cutouts he made as a Christmas presents for friends and family. I was drawn to one in particular which I believe he drew for his sister. Here’s a shot of it from his blog:
Much like Adam Savage, I’ll freely admit that I’m not a sculptor but I wanted to try and bring his creature into the 3D world anyway. I knew I was going to see Theo at PLAY and wanted to bring him something as a gift. The picture I had to work from wasn’t the greatest and I’m fairly sure the colors I used are more vibrant then Theo’s drawing, but I think did an adequate job.
Getting Ready For Play
For those of you who may not know, PLAY is an annual journaling retreat hosted by Teesha and Tracy Moore. One of the features of PLAY is a optional swap. For the past two years, I’ve bound a small 3 1/2″ X 5 1/2″ pocket journal for each participant. For the last two years I’ve made the same book, I settled on the design the first year because they’re easy to make and sew and since I’m putting about fifty of them together, well… you can see the logic. I do change the cover design and last year I also included a second small book which was based on the design of a Moleskine Cahier.
I thought about doing some small leather books this year but as time got tight, I decided to do the same one yet again. This year, I ran into a problem with the covers. I make the covers using two sheets of paper glued together, I use Rives BFK on the outside and black Rising Stonehenge on the inside. In the past I’ve decorated the cover with a simple acrylic wash and then printed the cover art with a Gocco. I wanted a little more texture this year so I went with Paste Paper, when I Gocco’ed the design on the prototype I found that the text and the artwork got lost in the design or the paste paper. I mentioned the problem to Cindy Iverson at The Paper Studio and she suggested using the letterpress; we set up the job so the design would have a little punch. The embossed quality the letterpress lent to the cover makes it work. Here’s a photo of the printing job in process.
Once the cover design wan printed the rest of the process was fairly straightforward, throw on a movie and just keep sewing like a madman until their all done. I ended up making 53 books, enough for everybody attending and a couple of extras — one for Andrew Borloz at Urban Paper Arts and one for Cindy at The Paper Studio for her help with the letterpress. Here are a couple of photos as they near the end of the process, the Gocco printing of the Colophon and the books waiting to have the Colophon pasted and then get packed up.
Where Did All The Posts Go?
Over the past year, I haven’t really put the energy into this blog I would have liked to but like almost everyone else I was a little more focused on survival over the past twelve months. That said, I had accumulated a few good posts and now, they’re gone. What happened? Let’s just say I zigged when I should have zagged while making some tweaks to the database. I’ll try and reconstruct those posts over the coming weeks but for now… I’m going to move on.
Middle Age Hiaku
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.
MiniMini
Last night I attended the opening of the MiniMini show at the the Cartel Coffee Lab. MiniMini was a call sponsored by the online artists community Spraygraphic and each piece of work submitted had to be 4″ X 4″. I love the sense of intimacy that small pieces so often communicate; I was excited to see the call and decided that I would submit something. The rules for the call weren’t very elaborate, the dimensions had to be 4″ X 4″ and depth really didn’t matter as long as the piece could be hung on the wall.
The call was very successful and ChuckB who curated the call ended up with 588 pieces submitted by 300 people from 20 countries. About 50% of the artwork was from other countries. The show wasn’t juried and everything that was received was hung but what was really surprising to me was the quality of the work, the submissions were just consistently good. In the last two days before the show was hung, 300 pieces flooded in and Chuck and his crew were so busy hanging them an index wasn’t ready by the time the show was up. I had a few favorites like these:
Moleskines
Like a lot of other book geeks I like Moleskines. Moleskines interest me because they are a study in the confluence of simplicity, utility, excellence but most of all, marketing. What I don’t like about Moleskines of course is the price. As Borders began winding down their operations though they were liquidating all stationary items at 40% off and as luck would have it they labeled Moleskines as stationary. I was able to grab whatever was left and I scored several ruled journals, about 7 Volants and a load of Cahiers. I was happy to have grabbed the Cahiers; a few months ago I had read an article in HOW Magazine about an artist who was using her Gocco to print artwork on the cover of Moleskine Cahiers and them selling them on Etsy. That’s probably what was on my mind when I bought them, I have a journaling retreat coming up in a couple of weeks and need something to give away. I thought I would just Gocco the Cahiers and use them as my giveaway; and then it hit me, I didn’t have enough of them.
Welcome
Strange Journals is a blog about bookbinding, art journaling, photography, print making and other related art forms. I named this blog Strange Journals because the materials I use and the journals I create don’t always follow the standard conventions of book binding. Book binding can have a certain meditative quality to it and if you sit down and talk to a group of bookbinders or people who journal regularly the word meditation will eventually pop up. They’ll talk about how the creative act of sewing a binding for example; the deliberate and repetitive nature of it leads to a meditative state.
I started this blog as a response to requests from several people; those who have taken my classes, a large group of people who know me online and several people who had been reading my intermittent ramblings on one of those free blogging services. Generally speaking, people were asking me to post images of the things I was working on and when possible an explanation of what led to to make that particular thing.
For those of you who may have been reading my stuff over at the free service, thanks for joining me here. For those who were expecting me to start about six weeks ago, I’ll simply blame the economy like everybody else; I’ll catch up. For those who are just stumbling across my blog: I’m a self-taught bookbinder and artist; I started as a photographer long ago but I dabble in things like graphic design, silk-screening and other paper-based art forms. So let’s begin.