Revealing the inspiration and process behind the making of my calligraphic manuscript books; lettering, painting, stitching, pasting, casing.
I’ve added two galleries to my website showing new artwork. These books take as inspiration poems by Mary Austin, a writer of the West from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She wrote famously and lyrically of the American West and especially the desert, first of the eastern Sierra in California, and later of northern [...]
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What makes a text sacred? There are probably as many answers to that as there are people who use them. Is text sacred when you feel a connection to something larger to yourself, whether or not you would call it Divine, something universal? Are there other kinds of sacred texts that may not have words, [...]
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If one book is a world in itself, then book upon book upon book offers so many avenues of discovery that it can be almost paralyzing if it wasn’t so exciting. This year I had only three hours at the Codex International Book Fair in mid-February. Rather than agonize over everything I wasn’t able to [...]
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New location for the by-now wildly anticipated Book Arts Jam: the Lucie Stern Community Center, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. FREE parking! This Saturday, October 20, from 10 to 4. Lots of book artists doing all KINDS of things. Here’s the link to more information: http://www.bookartsjam.org/ Forgive the late notice; I am still surrounded by [...]
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Alphabet Ancestors was accepted to be one of 1,000 images of bookish goodness in Quayside Publishing’s new 1,000 Artists’ Books, published this summer. I speculated that my book art was chosen because of the unusual wrapper closure (a rock with two holes acting as a button), but instead, one of my favorite interior page spreads [...]
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The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer are when I usually find a chance to puddle around in the studio, painting papers for later use in bookworks and whatnot. The hot dry summer heat is very conducive to this activity, allowing me to work in layers, adding letters, paste and inks to the paper and [...]
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This summer some of my works are out a-traveling the exhibit circuit. While I work on new book creations in the studio, completed books and art of the past few years are on view in the following places: Litanies for Mother Earth was accepted into The Poetic Pen exhibit at 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, [...]
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I’ve finally completed my year journal for 2012. This year I wanted to try a different binding than the usual softcover journals I make with longstitch or cross-structure bindings. A journal that lays flat is always preferred, and a Coptic stitched spine delivers this very nicely. I’m considering this stitched spine for a book project, [...]
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What I love about book arts is how varied the work is, how many ways there are to approach the making of a book that would never occur to me in a million years. Above is The Folded Forest by Elizabeth Sanford, two painted interlocking accordion pages, with tiny bits of the forest cut out, [...]
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In the deep thinking that goes into the imagining of a new book, I often begin with the words I want to use. Then the binding evolves from the content, as a means of best serving the words. Usually the very first practical concern I need to decide is the size. There are many other [...]
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