Back From Arrowmont

I'm back from my week at Arrowmont and Carol Barton's workshop, and it was a great learning experience. Carol is an excellent teacher: as good a teacher as she is an artist, a rare combination. She was generous with information beyond what the class covered, provided good templates and handouts, and was quick to offer individual counsel. She treated us to several slide shows on the main structures we made during the week: accordion, carousel and tunnel books. Since Carol lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C., she has access to wonderful resources at the Library of Congress and other similar institutions, so her slide presentations included some fascinating information (and images) documenting the history of "movable books."

I'll share some pix from the class soon. In the meantime, here are some of the images Carol shared with us -- all of which are available in the Gallery section of at her web site, Popular Kinetics. The first (above) is Carol's tunnel book Everyday Road Signs, 1998, an edition of 50.

Alphabet I, accordion pop-up bookScott McCarney

Our Japan, Garden View, carousel book by Edward Holmgren

One of my favorites, How Can I Live in Iowa?, carousel book by Emily Martin

The Penland Experience - Part 2

I'm still processing (what a clinical word that is!) my two-week book arts workshop at Penland. I signed up for the course because I wanted to explore content in bookmaking. I've been taking bookbinding classes for just over a year now, and I've concentrated on book structures. It seemed the way to lay a foundation in book arts, to build a vocabulary and establish a context. If you know me, it isn't news that I tend to be linear and incremental in my approach to things. So it seems that I've intuitively been developing a personal book arts curriculum over the course of the past year.

From the time I took my first book arts class -- at the John C. Campbell Folk School during a week's vacation more than two years ago -- I've been interested in the book as a whole, both form and content. I knew virtually nothing about artists' books at the time, and the more I learned, the more fascinating I found the concept and the books themselves.

It's too early to know how my own style will evolve. I love language too much to exclude words, so text will play a part. But what else? Who knows? I'm clearly attracted to paint and color and abstract forms. Art & Soul was a way to did my toe in this pool, in ways unrelated to book arts. The Penland workshop was a perfect next step, an opportunity to work on new book structures, but with an equal focus on creating imagery and working with paint.

Our instructor, book artist Laura Wait, has a bold, vivid style that attracted me to her work and to the class. She has a background in conservation, too, so she made it clear first thing that "books have to work!" In other words, technique matters. I knew at that point that I'd come to the right place.

More to come.

Laura Wait with one of her artists' books

Detail from another of Laura's books