Praeterita

Teaching is something I enjoy, but not if it means dying from a vicious respiratory infection. So I've joined the ranks of the online teaching community. My first class starts this evening. It's called Easy Bookbinding at Home, offered via Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago. The photo above shows the materials kits assembled at Lillstreet last week (by one person, alone and masked in a room). The kits were picked up by participants via kerbside pickup, exactly as if they were carrying out food from a local restaurant.  And the class list had to be extended beyond the proposed limit, indicating that there is a pent-up need in people stuck indoors to do something creative. Luckily I've worked a lot with technology in the past (I used to work full time in the IT industry), but of course there will always be glitches. But I'm looking forward to the class, and to writing up my experience later.

I started a few more jogged pamphlets in my studio this week. I did two using the 'vortex' print mentioned in a previous post: And I took some double-side prints made a few years ago and stitched them together to make alternating colours: Though I now realise that the best method is to print everything on the inside pages first, and then print the 'cover' image last.

... are featured in an article in this magazine, Fictionary, produced by the talented student faculty of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. They interviewed me and Audrey about our artist's books--and I didn't know Audrey was going to be the co-featured artist, so I am flattered to be on the same page as she. I think they didn't exactly choose the best picture of me from the reel that they shot (I look stoned or half asleep, and I can assure you I was neither). But that aside, it's a good article (click on the image to enlarge it to a readable size):

Today's link is to a blog that contains lots of links to tutorials for making artist's books. There are no fancy pictures, or flash video. There's nothing 4g about it: just lots of great information about making book bindings, casings, boxes, stitching, accordion books, tunnel books, flag books, star books. I've used this resource myself countless times over the past few years. Link here . And here is a picture from an album of handmade books by Geraldine Newfry that I found on the TJBookarts site:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

On the last day of the Journal & Sketchbook class at Columbia College Chicago, which Patty and I taught this past Spring semester, every student was required to read four pages from their final manuscript, and to show a piece of narrative-based visual art that was related in some way to the writing. I blogged about that final day before ( click here to see ). I kept one set of pictures back, because the project was so outrageous it deserved a post of its own. Lynn Shapiro, who had already produced a stunning, large accordion book midway through the semester, completely outdid even that effort by bringing in an artist's book that actually folded together to make a small playhouse: Every surface was covered with intricate, bright collages of paper, fabric, hand-painted elements, and text, relating to journal entries that united her memories of her children growing up and her love for trees: There are clear references to Matisse there, but also, now I'm looking at it, ...

I worked some more on our old friend, Mr. 8" x 8" Panel: I found out that if you're slathering lots of acrylic gels/glazing media around, spritzing the wet layer quickly with some isopropyl alcohol will prevent air bubbles from forming on the surface. Then I did something new. In preparation for the Artist's Book classes that I will teach during the summer, I tried out a flag book: The principle is that you glue pieces of imagery (your flags) onto an accordion fold spine, with the rows facing in opposite directions: When you open the book, it makes a satisfying 'click' as the flags open apart and pull in opposite ways: For the main image, I cut up an old print of mine into six segments. Then I stuck bits of another print on the back so that it could be viewed from both sides: Click on any of those photos to embiggen them and bask in the detail. It was great fun, and it opens up lots of exciting possibilities for creating and displaying images (and ...

It may only be early March, but it’s time to start talking about the summer classes that I will be teaching in June and July 2011. I am offering two classes at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts in northern Michigan. The ICCA offers classes and workshops to adults in a purpose-built building situated on the beautiful campus of the famous Interlochen Arts Academy. To whet your appetite, here is a brief slideshow of the printmaking class that I taught there in June 2010: Reduction Linocut , from June 13—June 17. Participants will create a handmade print in up to five colors, all from the same block of linoleum. This technique, first developed by Picasso, involves successively cutting away portions of the linoleum block after you have done printing from the block in each color (reducing the block after each stage). The five day course covers: selecting suitable imagery, transferring the image to the linoleum block, managing the cutting and proofing stages and correct registra...

On Thursday, I led the students in the Journal and Sketchbook class in an hour of automatic drawing. There was lots of scribbling and furious gestural movements. All 16 of the students produced really free, chaotic drawings. In preparation for going to the studio, I was in Kinko's taking photocopies of lots of found images from the internet, which I am using in the Lucerne Project. I also photocopied the Sharpie drawings that I did in the last few days, so I can turn them into acrylic skins. Then at the back of my sketchbook, I found a few squiggles of crayon that I'd drawn in order to illustrate the process of automatic drawing to the students. I decided it would be fun to enlarge some of these marks up to 400%, then turn the page a little and repeat, just to see what came out. So I used the paper-litho transfer process to transfer the images to Kitakawa paper, a beautiful Japanese handmade printmaking paper that has an ochre-beige colour. The results were, as our American cou...

Well, not that new, but as we're getting to the end of the year and blogging time is tight, I thought I'd post images of another artist's book that I made in the last year: It's called 'My Earliest Memory of My Father.' It's 2" high and 5" wide when closed, with bookboards wrapped in teal fabric. When you open it up, you see two things: on the right, an MP3 player showing a short stop-motion animation on a continuous loop; on the left, an accordion fold print of images from the animation. The animation is called 'My Earliest Memory of My Father', and I made it in 2006 for an installation at Finestra in Chicago. Here is the stop-motion animation:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I don't think I've posted this before. It's an accordion-fold book, called 'Coal'. Linocuts and xerox-litho transfers of sketchbook drawings, based on the mountains of coal that lay around the mining village where I grew up. Text printed on inside cover: I grew up in a mining town in the north of England. It was really a village, with 200 residents. You could see the wheels of the mines’ winding houses from the streets between the terraced houses. In the yards at the mine there were mountains of coal. Coal seemed to be everywhere. Bits of it lay on the streets where it fell from the carts that delivered it to the houses. We lit our fires with coal. We even bathed with soap made from coal. In the Victorian era, it was called King Coal.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

American readers may not be familiar with artist Paula Rego, born in Portugal but residing in England for many decades. In addition to paintings and large pastels, she is also a master printmaker, as this interview from the Tate Channel indicates. And if you want to do two weeks of printmaking with me at the Interlochen College of the Creative Arts in 2011, registration is now open for the two classes that I will teach: Reduction Linocut , and The Artist's Book .   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

For the past few months I've been devoting a little time each week to a combined printmaking, narrative, and online work called The Lucerne Project. Lucerne and Chicago are twin cities, so I thought it would be interesting to make some work based on the idea of personal narratives about people I've never met, in a place I've never been. The blog for the project is as much a part of the piece as the physical objects. I've just posted images of some new map-fold handmade books on the Lucerne Project blog, so I thought I would cross-post to that from here:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Another accordion book rolls off the Hartigan studio press: It was created using the same procedure as previous examples of its kind: take damaged photos of drawings, family photos, photos and drawings of mine buildings, and superimpose them on heavy printmaking paper; write a short phrase for each print, then lightly edit them so that they run together better; print text onto images; bish-bosh, sorted. Here is an example page:   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Last week I sent out some exhibition proposals for the 2-person show a version of which Patty and I did last year. Instead of just sending the usual bunch of pages with a CD of images, I decided to put the proposal, pictures, CVs and so on, together in the form of a small artist's book. So I made a 10 page booklet with a vellum cover, and used a simple pamphlet stitch to bind them together. The short slideshow above takes you through the process step by step. I think it came out well. Let's hope the museums think so too.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This is a page from a new artist's book I made recently. It's another accordion fold book, consisting of paper-litho transfer prints and drawings, with a narrative suggested by the choice of images. The images and the text refer once again to memories of my childhood in an English mining town. I called the book 'Kindertotenlieder', which all of you Mahler fans out there will instantly recognize as a song-cycle by the tortured Austrian master (translation: 'Songs on the Death of Children').   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

This is my 100th blog posting since I started 'Praeterita' in the last days of 2009. It's also eight years to the day that Patty and I were married. In honour of the occasion (the blog milestone: wedding anniversary celebration plans are somewhat different), here are some photos of a new handmade book that I completed a few days ago. Called 'Party of One', it's an origami book that uses a map fold, so that it folds and opens flat just like a NYC street map. Materials: an offcut of an acrylic painting, with more hand-painting, pencil drawing, and collage to complete the image: If you're reading this blog for the first time, please browse around the other pages, or look at the posts that other people have been reading most often. And leave a comment to let me know how I'm doing.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I just finished making a new artist's book. It's a project book to accompany the two-person exhibition  I did with Patty last year, based on her missionary-grandfather's letters and photos from the early 1900s. It's 4 inches high x 11 inches wide, covered in brown book cloth, Japanese stab binding with beaded side tail: The pages inside contain images of the source material, plus the prints that I made out of that material: I've been making more of these artist's books in the last few months, and I might post images of a few more.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader