Vanishing Photographs, a Book, and a Box
In February, I wrote to someone who had been a graduate student at SFAI, someone I had met at a gathering of students and educators at the Book Club of California in the Spring of 2013. I remembered...
View ArticleArtist Will Rogan and His Things
In the Matrix Gallery at the Berkeley Art Museum until June 9, 2014 is an exhibition of time-based works by Will Rogan, a local artist (so local he lives in my one-square-mile city of Albany). Just...
View ArticleVisual Poet: Good App for Traveling
On our latest adventure to the East coast, I brought my new journal with me, my airplane journal and my iPad mini with its apps. I have written before about Address Booklet & Cards and Brushes (the...
View ArticleCircle of Artists: Mission School
I missed the first showing at San Francisco Art Institute last fall, but was coincidentally able to catch Energy That Is All Around: Mission School during its second showing, this one held at the Grey...
View ArticleWhat I'm [Kinda] Reading
I'm reading three books. Or browsing one, ambivalent about the second, and loving the third. The first was produced by a famous Emmy Award-winning film director. The second won the Pulitzer Prize for...
View ArticlePhoto-based Erasure Texts
Erasure texts—most often made by taking one source page and striking out words to create a new text—are not new. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible by cutting and pasting the teachings he...
View ArticleWhite Shadows and Online Erasures
On my adventure researching erasure texts, I met a lovely little altered booklet of 42 pages that I noted last post, A Little White Shadow by poet Mary Ruefle. Part of the appeal is certainly the size:...
View ArticleStar 82 Review Summer Issue 2.2 is LIVE!
The sixth issue of Star 82 Review, the art and literary magazine I started in 2013, is now available online and in print.Like rivers, rocks, and beaches, the pieces in 2.2 seem to be about surviving,...
View ArticlePamela Colman Smith and The Green Sheaf Press
Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) is most famous, perhaps without the general public being aware of it, for the illustrations she did for the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck in 1909. I wrote about her a bit...
View ArticleInstructions: Coptic Binding (Paired Needles)
I'm in the middle of reading and writing currently, but I took a little break to make a little book for a friend's birthday. The painting-lettering was inspired by images featured in Handwritten:...
View ArticleWhen Nature Inspires Books
Gomphrena. I just met a plant named gomphrena. I've walked by this plant every day for weeks? months? But it took another pair of eyes to call my attention to it. My neighbor tends the neighborhood...
View ArticleBook Cloth, Gold Ink, and a Toothbrush
The FW pearlescent colors are opaque and can be used to quickly decorate or embellish book cloth. Use the dropper tip to add color to the bristles. Holding the brush facedown above (about a handspan)...
View ArticleAnother World with a Little Free Library
I thought I knew my neighborhood, but it turns out there are streets with well-worn me-grooves in them and streets that don't know my feet at all. And I don't know them, even though they are two blocks...
View ArticleYes, You Can Use Acrylic Inks on Museum Board
I had a cover dilemma. I wanted my covers to match the colors of the painted paper inside the book, but I knew I didn't have corresponding acrylic paint to match. I also knew I didn't want to distress...
View ArticleLines of Communication: An Accordion in a Slipcase
I woke up with the image of painted black lines. The day allowed me to follow the vision. And add to it. What was it?Pipes? Routes? Electrical wires? It wanted to be a kind of accordion so it would...
View ArticleBook House (a Little Free Library)
Up the hill, I think it was Edgecroft Road in Kensington, we spotted another little library, not officially connected to the Little Free Libraries and registered, but in the spirit all the same. This...
View ArticleInstructions: Threaded Accordion Book for the Wall
Someone has probably named this accordion, but I have not heard its name. It appears to be a simplified version of some of the structures in Claire Van Vliet and Elizabeth Steiner's Woven and...
View ArticleWords for One Threaded Accordion
Obsessed, I painted and assembled four threaded accordions without being completely sure what they were about. They sat in the studio for a few weeks before the words began to call. Here is the content...
View ArticleA Thick Magazine to Browse —Lapham's Quarterly
Over a year ago, must have been two, I read an article about the marginalia in medieval manuscripts and found the source: Lapham's Quarterly. I ordered that Spring 2012 issue, "Means of Communication"...
View ArticleTools: Brushes and Pens for Lettering
When I plan an edition of a book I know I am limited to the styles of metal type stashed in drawers in my studio: Caslon Oldstyle and Univers, some Bodoni, Bembo, and limited quantities of some other...
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