Journal

I have no idea who should be credited for this work, but I love them. They were posted on Google+ and that person had no clue as to the creator either.

I spent last Thursday and Friday at MCBA in a workshop with seven others making rounded drop-spine boxes with Jana Pullman. It was a good group of people and I had the privilege of having as a ‘paste partner’ Karen Hanmer, a book artist from Chicago who does some amazing work and who’s no stranger to MCBA.

Fortunately, after two full days, I was really happy with the way mine turned out, but I think the next workshop I take will have to be on paring leather. The box measures approximately 8.5″ x 6.5″ x 1.5″.

I’m now using Google+ and loving it. My profile can be found here.

Over at Artist Desktops Nate Larson is organising a collection of screenshots of artists’ computer desktop images. I have no idea how many of those people can find anything in the clutter, but the best has to be Blake Andrews‘ that he likens to a river with its currents and eddies, and his corresponding weblog post explaining it all.

His desktop kind of reflects his website design too.

As a printmaker who’s spent the best part of my career in a darkroom, my desktop image is of my darkroom tray.

For more information and to submit your images go to Nate Larson’s Tumblr website.

Last week I was in Santa Fe for the opening of Cy’s retrospective at the Verve Gallery. At the last minute Cy was unfortunately unable to make it, so I was asked to catch a flight and stand in for him.

The gallery looked stunning. Everyone at Verve has done a fantastic job putting this together. The show consists of platinum prints, polymer-photogravures and 3-colour gum dichromate prints in the main gallery and Cy’s latest book, The Four Elements, in the print room. This is a set of four hand-made books printed on Somerset Book paper with tipped-in images printed on Japanese paper and all housed in a slipcase.

I arrived on the Wednesday afternoon and headed soon after over to Photo-Eye for their First Wednesday Photo Salon with Patrick Nagatani and David Hyams. Patrick showed artwork made entirely of masking tape and which he calls tape-estries, while David spoke about his work with ambrotypes. Meanwhile, outside the gallery stood the Axle Contemporary mobile art gallery. This is a modified 1970 aluminum van that tours around Santa Fe and has a 6′ x 10′ gallery space.

Thursday morning I drove to the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops as I’d been invited there by a friend from Minneapolis who was taking a workshop with Christopher James. The workshop was a hive of activity and it was a pleasure to meet Christopher after hearing so many good things about him and his workshops, but I didn’t want to get in the way or out-stay my welcome so I left after an hour and went to meet another friend, Peter Ellzey, for lunch. Peter’s a great, generous guy and I regret not being able to spend more time with him. He’s an Apple guy, what do you expect…?

The gallery had arranged two openings; one being invite only for collectors on the Thursday evening and a public reception the following day. There was also an artist talk that had been scheduled for the Saturday afternoon, so I went and spoke about our working relationship over the past fifteen years and answered technical questions. It seems everyone in Santa Fe has made alternative/historical prints at some time or another.

I visited many galleries in Santa Fe, of course, but Andrew Smith‘s gallery just took it out of me, there was so much. I’d been to the old location, but this was new to me and seemed much, much bigger. I wanted to see everything but that wasn’t going to happen in one go, so I went back first thing Saturday morning. Despite being a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to images, I absolutely loved the work on show by Louviere and Vanessa. They’ve even invented their own process.

From the Andrew Smith Gallery press release -

Louviere + Vanessa have invented a process of printmaking that generates a similar luminescence to that found in historic orotones or goldtones.

They call their process Photo Noyée, which translates as “drowned image/photo,” to describe how photo-derived imagery, gold and other materials are encased (i.e. “drowned”) in resin. Images are printed on very thin, handmade Japanese “Kozo” paper that virtually disappears when resin is poured over it. Thus they appear to be suspended within glass.

Louviere + Vanessa invented Photo Noyée when they were working on the series “Instinct/Extinct” (2008-2010). They used it again in the silver leaf photographs from the “Folie à Deux,” series, as well as in their most recent body of work, “Counterfeit” (2011).

On Saturday I even managed to find time for a quick road trip up to Taos, located near the Land of Many Uses.

Cy DeCosse, A Retrospective is at the Verve Gallery of Photography, 219, East March Street, Santa Fe, NM. Telephone 505-982-5009. The exhibition is up through September 3rd 2011.

Salt is a recent book I’ve been working on for Cy DeCosse. It contains ten images printed on Somerset Book paper with hand-sewn signatures, a silkscreened front cover and handmade marbled endpapers by Steve Pittelkow. The size is 8″ x 10″.

All the images were photographed at the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 2010.

A nice three-minute short film on how an hourglass is made. Nothing to do with photography at all…

Via Kottke

This past weekend I took a fun tintype workshop with Lacey Prpić Hedtke at the Minneapolis Photo Center. The images are a self-portrait, my Keith Richards apple-head (made by my wife Beth Dow) on a stick and an arrangement.

This past Sunday we spent the day with Regula Russelle as part of our MCBA/Jerome programme. While the others worked with pressure prints, I experimented with monoprints on the Vandercook.

I wanted a cosmos-like, Milky Way-style effect, so using four inks I initially tried to apply all inks to the Plexiglass and print with just one pass of the press. This only resulted in a heavily-inked dark square, too dark even for me. So I tried building it up in successive layers which worked much better. A light layer of black was applied first, followed by white, brown and red. This method gave me more control over where the inks were placed and the ability to build it up gradually.

The images are only 3″ square, so very small, and were finally bound using drum leaf binding. As well as producing this small book, we also learnt 4-needle Japanese binding, which could be another possibility for my book, because this particular style lays perfectly flat.

I couldn’t agree more. From the weblog of Seth Godin.

BRING ME STUFF THAT’S DEAD, PLEASE

RSS is dead. Blogs are dead. The web is dead.

Good.

Dead means that they are no longer interesting to the drive-by technorati. Dead means that the curiousity factor has been satisfied, that people have gotten the joke.

These people rarely do anything of much value, though.

Great music wasn’t created by the first people to grab an electric guitar or a synthesizer. Great snowboarding moves didn’t come from the guy who invented the snowboard… No one thinks Gutenberg was a great author, and some of the best books will be written long after books are truly dead.

Only when an innovation is dead can the real work begin. That’s when people who are seeking leverage get to work, when we can focus on what we’re saying, not how (or where) we’re saying it.

The drive-by technorati are well-informed, curious and always probing. They’re also hiding… hiding from the real work of creating work that matters, connections with impact and art that lasts. I love to hear about the next big thing, but I’m far more interested in what you’re doing with the old big thing.

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Posted by Seth Godin on March 14, 2011 | Permalink

I haven’t written too much lately about the MCBA project, but it’s not as if I’ve been slacking – far from it. All the while I’ve been busy with projects for other clients, my head’s been accumulating ideas for my book.

However, I’ve given up on the idea of running a separate weblog documenting the whole process for several reasons. Although it isn’t technically difficult to write, post and maintain two different weblogs, I found myself deliberating over what posts should be posted to which weblog. That resulted in much being written but never posted, or posted twice – once to each weblog. In the end it was a sort of “fuck it” attitude that won – just post everything to one of them and be done with it. So now I’ve merged the two weblogs.

We’ve taken several workshops over the past two months. I regret having missed Richard Stevens‘ some weeks back on reductive linocuts, but it couldn’t be avoided. The edition that the other mentees produced though was wonderful and I’m thrilled that they gave me a copy.

In February we had two workshops; one with Julie Baugnet using mixed media and one on silkscreen printing. The book I made in Julie’s class was a disaster and no-one’s fault but my own. I managed to completely screw up the sewing of the codex binding, but the important thing was it gave me a chance to loosen up and discover ways of working with different media and paints that I would have otherwise never used. So I learned a lot from the workshop. Silkscreen printing was fun too and gave me several ideas for the book cover.

One of the things I discussed with Julie was limited editions. She’s from a painting background where works are usually unique, and this is reflected in her books – most exist as a single copy. But my background in photography and printmaking is exactly the opposite, buyers, collectors and galleries want editions. Yet my original idea of producing an edition of 20 books plus proofs had started to become a little daunting, so I think I’m going to scale it back to a more manageable 12 copies plus proofs. It’s still a lot of work though, as each book will have approximately 20 images and will involve making clamshell cases.

I’m thrilled that my mentor throughout the rest of the year is to be Regula Russelle, this year’s recipient of the Minnesota Book Artist Award. But truthfully, all three of the mentors are such tremendous artists in their respective fields and I love what they each bring to the book arts, that I wish we could have access to all three.

Russelle began making one-of-a-kind books during graduate work at Hamline University in the mid-1990s and has been making books on her own and with others ever since. In 1999, she established Cedar Fence Press, a small independent press that publishes limited edition books and prints. She teaches books arts and papermaking for undergraduate and graduate students at Augsburg College and beginning through advanced letterpress printing at MCBA.

She was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award for Fine Press, and had been named a finalist for the same award three times prior (2000, 2001 and 2006). In collaboration as Accordion Press, Russelle and fellow artist CB Sherlock were awarded a 2007-08 MCBA/Jerome Foundation Book Arts Fellowship. Other honors include an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant and recognition from the International Society of Bookbinders. Her work is shown and collected internationally.

For the last several weeks after school my son Miles has been making prints as one of the six participants in the ACCESS/PRINT Project mentorship at Highpoint Center for Printmaking.

The ACCESS/PRINT Project (A/P Project) is a young artists’ mentorship program for high school students in grades 10–12. The selected participants must be highly motivated and committed to creating a strong portfolio that will be exhibited in the gallery at Highpoint. Participants will work with professional artist mentors at Highpoint’s printshop to learn printmaking processes including monoprinting, drypoint etching, relief block printing and screenprinting. After this introductory period, participants will plan an independent project that uses one or more of these techniques. Through individual mentorship, peer critique and supervised work sessions young artists will develop printmaking skills and gain confidence in their art-making.

There’s a drop-in open house next week, Wednesday February 23rd, 4.30 – 7.00 pm and the show’s opening reception is April 22nd, 5.00 – 7.00 pm.

This past week I made a book, Badlands, which is primarily a practice piece for my MCBA mentorship. The images were photographed in the Badlands National Park, South Dakota and originally printed in platinum, although I’ve always felt they’d work well together in a small book.

The book contains 10 inkjet images printed on soft white Somerset Book paper, with hand-sewn signatures and a black Japanese bookcloth and Fabriano Roma paper cover. It doesn’t resemble in any way the final format for my MCBA book, but I did want to get more experience with the binding techniques. It’s 10″ x 8″ in size with 6″ square images. I laid out the minimalist book design in InDesign and printed the spreads using Roy Harrington’s excellent Quadtone RIP software to control the tonality of the images.

This is only the second time that I’ve bound a multi-signature case-bound volume, so I’m pleased it at least resembles a book. There are plenty of things wrong with it, although some may not be apparent, but I know they’re there.

Recently I spent a morning at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts with the assistant curator of photographs, Christian Peterson, looking at portfolios and books that have original photographs bound in as I need to figure out a way of incorporating about twenty photogravures into my book. Christian pulled the books out of storage for me, including many by Lee Friedlander. One was especially interesting as it managed to combine both a quarter bound book, original silver prints and a case.