Rowing Boat Update

Group 7! I was excited to open my first book from Gene Epstein a few days ago. A lovely take on "Delicate." Thanks, Gene. Will you post a photo of your book here?


I've been pondering and avoiding the "Rowing Boat" Book Art Object project for months now caught up on the boat structure. I know I'm missing something obvious, but after trolling for boat making directions--- finding cute ones for real row boats and origami instructions for boat-like structures--- and making clumsy clay and foam core structures, I've determined to follow my attraction to the abstract notion of a vessel. This decision is based on the stash of floral wire and wrap I found in a drawer and the lessening of frustration experienced while making these. On the spiritual front, it is pleasurably meaningful to shape them between the palms of my hands.

My next step is to tear into the old journals. In doing this, I find passages that are worth "sending out to dry" but which don't work with the original structure, which is a coptic bound book. Doing this means cutting up pages and getting any narrative out of order. Instead, I'm counting on my old favorite, the meander, so that lucky readers will get one page, front and back. I find I do want to send even a fragment of a story rather than the rain of words I thought would "do."

The covers are chipboard covered with paste paper scraps from the yards of same I've been making this summer.

More and more soon. They are coming.

How to Distinguish Scents Artist Book

Part 2

Once I exposed all the plates and laid them out on the grid I'd created, I inked them up and made some prints. At my best time, I can wipe a plate (this is intaglio, the ink goes into the lines etched by the sun, I wipe the rest) in 15 minutes. What I never managed to do was wipe it completely clean, or so I thought. This forced me to re-consider using white paper. I printed nicely on a rough gray paper, which camaflouged the grey residue left on the plate, but it was a non-archival wrapping paper and I wasn't about to put the whole project, which by now was costing me some real money (for me) and serious time. So I selected a variety of Canson papers at Binders, including a pleasant gray.

I also decided to forgo the folded format. I was pretty sure I'd make too many mistakes, probably very close to the end of each pull. So I made a complete set on smaller pieces of paper (the plates are 5x7 inches.)

After printing a complete set, I cut them to equal size and played around with waxed linen thread, creating loops to connect the pages that would have normally been folded and leaving them off the pages that would have been cut apart. The photos below show a small (2x3inch) mockup of the stitching and the completed first version. I call this a mockup too, but it's really my working edition, complete with missteps and extra stitching holes. I'm currently editioning the book, hoping to manage five complete books by the end of April. I'm also working on a container, but that's another story!