Book-a-Day: Day 4

I've been moving -- slowly, I know -- through the products of my BookWorks class with Dan Essig. On the fourth day (this series is beginning to sound like an installment from Genesis) our focus was a concertina binding. Think of it as one, long continuous spine-guard that covers the spine-edge of each signature. The concertina adds particular strength to the binding. Folding the concertina EXACTLY is one of the challenges of making this book. In the photo to the right you can see the folds of the concertina between each signature.

It's not an easy binding to stitch, since you're trailing the concertina while you're attaching each signature, but it gets easier with practice (and, of course, as you keep attaching signatures, the remaining amount of concertina lessens). We used a coptic stitch with bent needles. Dan doesn't like curved needles, but straight needles don't do the job, so we softened the metal of our needles over a candle flame and bent the ends at a 45% angle with pliers. Personally, I love curved needles for coptic bindings.

The cover was attached in a style very similar to the one we used for the papyrus book on Day Two. With this fourth book, when we covered the front and back cover-boards with paper, we left a "flap" on each cover on the spine side. We sewed through the inside fold of each flap, treating the cover like another signature. We used Cave paper for our covers, so it was strong enough to withstand being sewn through. If you were using a lighter-weight paper, you'd want to reinforce the area with a material such as Tyvek, which is strong and thin.

We also practiced making insets in the cover (indentations made by lifting layers of board with an exacto knife before we covered the boards). I adhered leftover bits of paper I'd painted and used for signatures in an earlier book.

Dan's primer on concertina-folding

We had great fun, but worked pretty intensely too.

Arrowmont - Part 2

My class at Arrowmont with Carol Barton (at right) was on pop-up structures and movable books (the larger category of which pop-ups are a part). We spent a portion of each day on pop-ups; the rest on books. Some in our class seemed to have a natural talent for the former and created some fairly elaborate scenes. I was satisfied to learn the mechanics and spent more time on book structures. I'm reminded of something Dan Essig, in the class I took with him last recently, said about his and his brother's different talents. As kids, his brother (now a historian) did well on tests that involved reading and comprehension; Dan (now a book artist) did well on tests that involved objects revolving in space. Pop-ups, I think, benefit from a mind that's good at visualizing objects revolving in space.

The pop-ups were great fun, and some of them were surprisingly simple. The great talent, of course, is in combining the various techniques to create the type of work that we see in sophisticated commercial pop-up books -- for example, Robert Sabuda's Alice in Wonderland.

As to books, we worked on four book structures during the week: an accordion book, a blizzard book (developed and so named by Hedi Kyle), a carousel book, and a tunnel book. For all but the blizzard book, where the content is pretty much the structure itself, we were expected to develop our own content, and most of us spent our evening work-hours on that.

I've mentioned before that Carol is a very good teacher, and she did a great job of putting the work we were doing in context. Before she presented each of the book structures -- the blizzard book excepted -- we viewed a slide show containing examples of that particular form, created by a variety of artists. Carol has done a good deal of research on early examples of movable books, so the presentations were both inspirational and good history lessons.

Most of us didn't complete the tunnel book, which was our last project, since the carousel book took longer than we expected. But many of us were able to develop a prototype for the book, which helped us work out the issues raised by tunnel book construction. It was a very full week.

Class projects

Pop-up and small accordion book by Sandy C., one of the students in our class

Pop-up by another student. The photo doesn't do a good job of capturing the dimension.

My accordion book, Pattern

A not-particularly-good photo of the same accordion book, which includes a poem by Dorothy Parker.

The cover of the whimsical accordion book by a student, an Arrowmont work-study artist

The same book's contents, depicting the work-study kitchen staff

My carousel book, Nesting

Another view of the book

A detail of one of the 5 panels

Baskets from the paper basketry students

Cloth in the Text & Textiles class

Dyed fabric drying

One of the works in progress

The Penland Experience - Part 4

A few more pix of my books and page details from the Book Arts workshop I participated in at Penland. You can read my earlier posts about my time at Penland here, here, and here. The colors on my pages are a result of 1) the paints available for use by the class; and 2) pure chance. What surprised me most was how much I liked the palettes. The day before I arrived at Penland, I wouldn't have seen myself using these combinations. Each time I look at my books now, they tell me to keep trying new things.

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

The Penland Experience

The specifics of my Book Arts workshop aside, my two weeks at Penland were like nothing I've experienced. The environment is designed to make the work the entire focus. The accommodations are spartan, there's no television or radio, meals are short, and the campus is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. So the intensity is built in, which is all to the better. And because everyone is equally absorbed, you feel a kinship with all the perfect strangers that you meet and take meals with and run into at the coffeeshop. Nobody cares how you're dressed or what you do in your "real" life, unless you're an artist. That's worth talking about. "How's your class going?" is the main question at meals. Almost always, it's followed by a comment about how tasty the (french toast, pasta, salad, pesto grilled cheese sandwich) is and how impossible it is that you're still eating three such squares every day.

The view from the Pines dining hall tells you that you're in the country, and the llamas in the field remind you that you're at Penland. For a little solitary R&R I headed to the Craft House porch and the coffee house directly downstairs.

While I was there, PBS aired a three-part series, Craft in America, the first nationally-broadcast series on contemporary craft in the U.S. Penland was featured in the third installment, Community.

More to come soon. Here are a few photos to tide you over.

A great photo by Mary, one of the students in the Book Arts class,
of the view from the Craft House.

Similar view from the Craft House in the evening.
The grass looks like ice, doesn't it?

Part of the ceramic "garden"

A resident llama -- another great shot by Mary

Secret Belgian Binding

I'm learning a new binding in a workshop at BookWorks: Secret Belgian binding. Book artist Hedi Kyle is credited with rediscoveing this historic binding, attributed to the Belgians. It uses an exposed sewing to bind the text block to cover boards and a separate spine, with the spine held in place only by the threads passing over and under it. In addition to its beauty, it's considered a very sturdy binding. Laurie Corral, who's teaching the class (she's also BookWorks' founder and director) has paced the class well -- three evenings over three weeks -- so that the students are not rushed and can both learn and enjoy the experience. (In my photo of Laurie, she's cutting paper on BookWorks' massive guillotine, about which I lust, wishing that I could build a room simply to house such a lovely and functional object.)

This week we sewed our text block using tapes (see photo). It was the first time I'd worked with tapes, and I can see the value. It's a lovely, simple stitch, and relaxing to sew, especially in a group. We were joined by Andy Farkas (writer, printmaker and book artist), who was working in the studio, in talking a bit about the definition of an "artist's book." The $64,000 question. (Here's Wikipedia's attempt).

For me, it's a book wherein the content and the form are so closely intertwined that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Naturally that begs the question of how you define the "book" part of the equation, since an artist's book need not have a traditional book form, so mine is at best a partial description. Andy's definition focused on the work being created in its entirety by the artist. He agreed that content needs to be referenced in a definition, if only to suggest the artist's choice of no content. This started me thinking about whether, in fact, an artist's book can have no content. Or, can a viewer ever look at an artist's book without ascribing content to it? Or to take it further, isn't an artist's intent to omit content itself the content? Better minds than mine are no doubt wrestling -- or ignoring -- questions such as these, so BookGirl will sit it out for now.

The rest of the pix are of a book Laurie made with the SB binding, of the first signature after being sewn onto the tapes (Tyvek strips affixed to the side of the work table with adhesive tape), and of a sewing card with alternate views of the outside and the inside of the binding. I can't wait to hold my finished book in my hands.

Field Trip

Tuesday was a field trip with a friend to visit the gallery in Burnsville that will be hosting the exhibition for our Book Salon for a month later this year. It's a lovely space. Coincidentally, Wendy Reid, the owner, serves with me on the Board of HandMade in America. She's brought in a wonderful selection of art at all price points. I noticed that the gallery participates in several community and philanthropic causes, usually by donating a percentage of sales of specific objects.

We stopped in at the Burnsville Town Center across the street from the gallery to see a quilt that my friend had heard about. It's amazing. The work of quilt artist Barbara Webster, it portrays key places, people and sights in the history of Yancey County, and surrounds them with representations of the four seasons. She used both old photographs and took over a thousand new ones. it's a masterpiece of design, and spans the entire lobby wall (the size is 24' x 7'). It's well worth making a trip just to see it.

After lunch (which was a delayed birthday treat for me), we traveled on to Penland School of Crafts, so that my friend could visit with a book artist friend she hadn't seen for nearly 20 years, Jana Pullman, who's been teaching a two-month class in leather bindings. I planned to visit Annie Fain Liden, who's currently a teaching assistant in Beth Ross Johnson's weaving class. Annie Fain is one of my bookmaking teachers as well as a friend, and it was a joy to catch up with her.

It was a long day, and a good one. I'm soooo looking forward to the book arts workshop I'll be taking at Penland this summer with book artist Laura Wait. I've been Googling Laura to learn more about her work and have found many examples of her books, which has made me even more enthusiastic about learning from her.

Summing Up the Week

Well, I didn't get into the Hedi Kyle workshop at Penland, but did get into Laura Wait's workshop. I don't know where I fell in the lottery, so I have no idea how far down on the waiting list I am for the former. I'm disappointed about not getting to study with "the book goddess (my term for her)," but looking forward to the class with Laura Wait. We'll be doing at least one case-bound book, so I expect it will be very different from what I might have done in Kyle's class. I am hopeful -- and the workshop description seems to indicate -- that we'll spend a fair amount of time on content as well. I'd be more disappointed if I weren't scheduled to take a class at Arrowmont in August with Carol Barton, who is known for her pop-up and tunnel book structures. That will balance out my summer's work nicely.

I started my classes at UNCA: 'Women in the Short Story' class and 'The Art of Watching Film.' They're both very good (the teacher for the film class is particularly dynamic), and I'm only sorry that I'll be missing of one each of them, as I have a HandMade in America Board retreat that I'm scheduled to attend (and looking forward to) in a few weeks. We read Irwin Shaw's 'The Girls in Their Summer Dresses' for the first short story class, a little gem of a piece. Luckily, there are no wallflowers in the class, so we had a voluble, spirited discussion. Our film session focused on using literary analysis tools to analyze film, and we watched clips from Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, and City Lights, and Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. in its entirety. Almost every class will include one entire movie, to illustrate a theme. To start the class, each student was asked to introduce himself/herself and mention a favorite film. An impossible task. It was a great ice breaker and a good way to get a sense of people through their choices (or at least to delude myself that I was). I simply mentioned two films that I love: Days of Heaven and Bringing up Baby. According to my film-choice disclosure theory, I wonder what that said about me?

Friday, which was to be my Studio Day, turned out to be a play date in Asheville with my friend Carol. We cruised a couple of galleries (including Ariel, where we saw some of Dan Essig's latest work), stopped in at Early Girl for lunch, Malaprop's for coffee, and True Blue for art supplies. I haven't done that in quite a while, and it felt great. The splendid spring day felt as lighthearted as we. Oh, and we located Eaties, the cereal bar, for future reference.