Tag: books
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Sometimes I buy an old book from a thrift store or junk shop simply for one image inside. In this case, this image is from a 1927 book called, Brock’s Book on Birds, which seems to be one of those advertising in book form that was fairly common in the 1920–30s especially. This very unique etching is in the chapter “Washing Canaries”. I loved the oddity of the rather awkwardly posed hand and the softly dismayed canary. It’s the sort of image that makes me want to make something without having any idea what. That happens to me where I…
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All books are mechanisms for traversing time and space. These two books that I recently grabbed at the thrift store do that in multiple ways. These Choose Your Own Adventure titles first came out in the lates 1970s and were just the thing for me as a pre-teen reader. I was reading the Narnia books and Madeleine L’Engle’s time warping novels. I also read loads of Ray Bradbury, Asimov, and harder science fiction like Larry Niven’s Ringworld books that mostly went over my head. I was into computers and fantasy at the same time so there was something about stories…
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I started a new drawing project book tonight. It’s a 1976 Olympics commemorative book but that topic isn’t meant to inform the drawings I do. I like having something besides a blank page to react to and I’m sure in some cases the underlying text grid and images will nudge my drawings in interesting directions. I’ve posted a video to YouTube about getting started and showing me alter the cover and begin a drawing on the first page. https://youtu.be/Fy29waQDhr0?si=wH_TLDQ7Z6hHd-Ny
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At least this is how I made one. You should make one too! I’m not usually someone that feels like the way I make things is of much direct value to other people. I feel the same about other artists’ work. I am interested in why artists make what they make and how they connect to a process for making but not as much in the techniques they might use. I know that I primarily learn and discover from direct experience and less so from following someone else’s patterns. In making my art book Imaginary Landscapes recently, I did realize…
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I’ve published a new art book! Imaginary Landscapes is a 7×7″ 32-page artist designed and published compilation of a series of my intuitive abstracted watercolour landscapes. This book has 34 paintings of natural spaces created purely from imagination and the properties of pigments in water. These small paintings, originally made in 2020 at 3×3″, have been sequenced and set as new complimentary pairs. Many of the paintings are presented at their original size as I quite love that scale as handheld portals into each of the natural worlds I painted. But part of my interest in pulling them together in…
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Back in 2016, my partner Gayla Trail and I collaborated to self-publish her fifth book, Grow Curious. She was the author and I did the design and artwork. I don’t talk about my design work here as much but I have been working as a designer since 1994 across a variety of media and formats. My design and art practices heavily inform each other. Grow Curious was the fourth of Gayla’s books I designed. We used Kickstarter to successfully fund a two-colour offset print run of 1200 copies. It was a labour of love and each of us pushed ourselves…
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In my last post I talked about one of the main spaces I work creatively these days and having the tools, supplies, and various points of inspiration and connection at hand while I work. I’ve always been interested in finding the lines that join to and run through things. As a kid, my encyclopedia set and the image rich Time-Life nature, science, and anthropology volumes on our home bookshelves were a world of connections in my hands. Those books felt like they contained the universe. As part of how I make art now, I practice at finding transient connections between…