April is National Poetry Month — lots of ideas on how to celebrate here. And April 17th is National Haiku Poetry Day. I enjoyed looking at the haiku contest winners and comments from previous celebrations.
Deepak Chopr’s Map Fold Book
Most people find my shop in a very mundane way — a typical response to “how did you find me” is “I searched for ‘artist book’ on Etsy.” But last week I got an unexpected and pleasant answer from a woman who bought one of my bookmaking kits. She told me that she had seen a charity auction for The Lunchbox Fund that included a book of images and eight meditations handwritten by Deepak Chopra. She went on to say “I so enjoy origami and this book enchanted me by the way it was constructed. I googled the Turkish map fold and selected the images search. I clicked on one of your photographs and checked out your website.”
Intrigued by the Turkish map fold reference, I looked for the auction, which had just ended. The book went for $820! Here’s the description as well as nice photographs showing the book opening…
Reflecting on the personal journey, each page is folded into a Turkish map and arranged as an accordion which bursts open, blossoming to reveal the colorful text and images within. The covers are embroidered in a floral motif with stem and running stitches in cadmium yellow on Marc Jacobs teal wool cloth and mounted onto Japanese Unry-shi Kozo board. 5” by 5”. Made in collaboration with Alaska L. McFadden. Auction photos by David Belisle.
Do also check out Alaska McFadden’s website and her other books.
Prompt Challenge: Catechize
First, a fun fact: catechize was first used in the sense of “to question” by Shakespeare in Othello (Act 3, Scene 4). Desdemona is looking for Cassio and she asks the Clown if he knows where to find him:
DESDEMONA: Can you inquire him out and be edified by report?
CLOWN: I will catechize the world for him, that is, make questions, and by them answer.
I was pretty stumped by this week’s word, until I reread the definition and saw the synonyms: interrogate, quiz, examine, probe. I decided then to concentrate on the question/probe part of the definition.
Every year about this time, I start working on my calendar design. And every year I try out some layouts that aren’t my usual 12-pages-with-haiku-and-design-that-fit-in-a-plastic-CD-case. Regardless of the layout and size, haiku is always an element, and one of the big challenges is to write poems that are worth reading and re-reading and contemplating for an entire month. For this week, I attempted to substitute pithy (but not too serious nor too silly) questions into my layout, rather than haiku.
The layout I’m working with groups the months into 4 sets of 3 months. For each set, there are 3 related collages that overlap by using longer and longer pages, so that the bottom of the 2nd and 3rd months can be seen while looking at the first month and the bottom of the 3rd month can be seen when viewing the 2nd. I mocked-up one set, April, May and June….
The challenge, though, was the questions. Here’s the three I came up with:
- What super-hero would you be, what would your costume look like & what would be your motto?
- What’s your first memory?
- What’s the nicest thing that anyone has ever said to you?
Next up:grouse, v; To grumble; complain.
Popups
I’ve got a few ideas for pop-up books, but when I run across them in in my notebook it’s not long before I remember how much work they are to construct, since I hand-cut all the pieces. I’ve been thinking about getting a die cutting machine that will cut pieces directly from Illustrator. Mary Jeanne Linford uses this fancy one to make her pop-up books. She has some nice youtube videos showing them off:
- No Dog, No: six reasons not to own a dog
- Tools, a popup about carpenters tools
- A Bainbridge ABC, a ABC book about Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Here’s a still from the tool pop-up
Art Assignments
Maybe it’s just my recent preoccupation with my prompt challenges, but I’m now regularly noticing and hearing about other such assignments. Today the NY Times reviewed a book compiled by the art magazine Paper Monument called Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment that says the book “is a collection of art teacher folk wisdom — the best classroom assignments that the contributors, most of them artists or art teachers, have given or received or even heard of.”
A few example assignments:
Take an 18 x 24 inch piece of paper and make a drawing using nothing but your car.
Design a monstrance.
Make a paper doll of yourself.
Redesign a rainbow.
Apparently most of the assignments are pretty ambiguous, although in a blog post about the book, Dwight Garner mentions this one from the artist Helen Mirra:
Make an autobiography with books from the library. Using the Library of Congress classification system, choose books with call letters which are part of your name. Photocopy the stack of books, showing the full spines, so your name reads across the bottom of the page of the photocopy. If needed, scale the image to fit on a single sheet of paper. The titles of the books form the autobiography.
Poetry Inspiration
Last week I went to the opening of a show called “Odes & Offerings” at the Community Gallery here in Santa Fe. Our current Poet Laureate had selected 36 poems by local poets, then artists applied to make a piece using a line or phrase from one of the poems as inspiration. Many of the artists incorporated the text of the phrase into their finished piece, and it was quite wonderful to see a gallery so full of words!
One of the pieces I particularly admired was by Joy Campbell, a sculpture that had small books in it. Turns out I had run across Joy’s work a few months ago at another gallery here (one with a small side room labelled “book arts!”) She makes altered books, and they are quite wonderful. You can see many of them here. And below is the piece I saw at the opening, The Yellowwood Tree, from poem by Lauren Camp. On her blog, Lauren says “Joy told me, ‘Your lines Decades ago, she planted the book of life and added daily to its chapters and Now, the many pages of her story grow around her are the words that inspired me to do the art piece.’”
