March 2011 – Green Chair Press Blog

A Chair Is Still A Chair

From my press name, you might guess I’m slightly enamored with chairs, at least my own. Another person taking inspiration from a chair is Mark Gleberzon, who explains “I have been painting this same chair for almost 15 years as a tribute to my parents after taking it with me when I moved out. I love its form and architecture and always find some new detail I didn’t see before.”
The particular painting to the left was at the Architectural Digest Home Show and is a bit different than Gleberzon’s other chair paintings in that it has words. The words are from the song A House Is Not A Home (lyrics by Hal David). (Seen on Design Milk.)

Pi Leaf

My Pi Day post was a bust — the youtube video was taken down because of copyright issues. Pi Day fell on a Monday this year. Tuesday morning I found the leaf pictured below on the front stairs of my house. Looks like several Russian Olive tree leaves got stuck to an old Aspen leaf — we have many of these trees on our property, several of them right next to each other. I thought it was a lucky coincidence, don’t you?

Pi Leaf

How to Celebrate Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month. How are you going to celebrate? O: The Oprah Magazine suggests you update your wardrobe, in a article subtitled “Modeling the latest looks, eight rising poets express their dynamic personal styles—and show you how to cultivate your own.” I found out about this unusual way to celebrate from this article by David Orr. (I always enjoy Orr’s columns on poetry for the NY Times, you can read past ones here.) Orr starts out his column about the O Magazine article

The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003. This is all part of O’s special issue celebrating National Poetry Month, edited by the noted verse aficionado Maria Shriver and including interviews with “all-star readers” like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, the gossip columnist Liz Smith and someone named James Franco, who is apparently an actor.

Read the entire column here. The photo to the left is of poet Tara Bracco, taken by Ruven Afandor.

Great Ampersand

I’m ending the week with this great wood type ampersand, seen on Letterpress Daily. The face is Gothic Tuscan Condensed from Wells & Webb. (See lots more great wood type from Wells & Webb here.)

New Exhibition Page

Until 2009, I was webmaster for San Francisco Center for the Book. When they redesigned their website, the pictures and other material for past exhibitions at the Center disappeared. I’ve resurrected them on my website. (To the left is Laura McCarthy’s
Hibernation, from the exhibit Book Arts 2001: A Student Odyessy.)

	Book Arts 2001: A Student Odessy Celebrating a spectrum of booksworks inspired by teachers + classes at the San Francisco Center for the Book.
	Celebrating Teachers as Artists An exhibit of works by SFCB instructors.
	Artist’s Books: Unlimited Engagement This exhibit marks the culmination of a year-long class dedicated to sustained inquiry into the nature of the artist’s book.
	Show Me a Story: Children’s Books & the Technology of Enchantment This show explores the intangible workings of children’s books, with a focus on design and structure.
	Revealing the Mysteries: The Development of the Artist’s Book in the Bay Area This exhibition pays homage to the development of book arts in the Bay Area over the past half century.
	Inside Cover An exuberant and witty exhibition of international artist’s books.
	Photo Books Now Photo artists imagine myriad new possibilities for the book.
	New West Coast Design: Books This exhibition presents some of the best book artists on the west coast, with a high level of craft being the common denominator.
	Livros do Cordel:Books on a String An exhibition celebrating the famous livros do cordel, the printed folk literature of northeastern Brazil.
	Bartkowiak’s Best Book Art from the Hamburg Archives
	The Hand Bookbinders of California’s 29th Annual Members Exhibition
	2008 Pacific Center for the Book Arts Triennial Members’ Exhibition

Cyanotype

In 2001-2002, I took a year long artist’s book class at San Francisco Center for the Book. One of our assignments was to make a book that embodied a specific physical place. In rambling around her neighborhood, looking to see what place she wanted to use, one of the participants, Cyanotype Scarf Dina Tooley, found an old photo-enlarging machine sitting on the side of the street. Whenever I see cyanotype blue, I think of Dina’s excitement in experimenting with the machine & the book that resulted — it’s to the right.
So a flood of memories of that class came back to me recently when I saw this tutorial for printing on fabric using sunlight. The tutorial is from Christine Schmidt’s new book Print Workshop: Hand-Printing Techniques and Truly Original Projects. (You can look through the book on Amazon.)