Ukulele Series Book #2: The Ukulele Accordion. 1996 Text is Little Grass Shack, handwritten and illustrated ukulele shaped paper cut in paper doll style. Leather bound cover with leather onlay picture in sound hole."I love to make books and I love to play the ukulele. Can I put these two loves together? Can I make a book out of a uke?" After Donna and I made the first one, I thought, "How many more can we make? Each one will have to represent a different book structure, format or concept and each will still have to play...." Well, to date...
George A. Walker’s Nightlife
While in art school in the 1980's noted book artist and wood engraver George A. Walker had to keep a visual dream diary for one of classes. The assignment was simple- set your alarm clock every evening and when it goes it off in the morning "set to paper whatever fragments could be salvaged...before the fanciful thoughts dissipated in the harsh glare of dawn"Some 25 years later George A. Walker is still keeping his diary. Not only is he recording his dreamscapes on paper but he is producing an accompanying wood engraving! Walker says his "dream diary is a record...
Arthur Jaffe Shows Off His Book Arts Collection
The Arthur & Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University houses one of the best book art collections in the country.Connie Ogle has a great piece in The Miami Herald, "A new leaf: Revising the way we think about books and reading", on Jaffe and the collection.The collection has grown to some 12,000 items and offers "a dizzying array of subject matter and form."Commenting on the collection and the unique place book arts occupy in special collections, William Miller, director of FAU libraries, says ''It's a very unusual collection. It expands the concept of what a book...
Artists’ Journals and other Queer Fish
Last night the first issue of The Coelacanth Journal was launched in London by its editors, the artists Phoebe Blatton and Susan Finlay. The venue was Shipley Art Booksellers on the Charing Cross Road, where earlier in the day I had acquired an unparalleled haul of works by my favourite author, Margery Allingham (but that’s another story).The Coelacanth Journal is of interest not just because it’s witty and provocative. It is one of a number of brilliant new ventures which illustrate an increasing tendency by artists engaged in the book form to become editors, merging the model of art production...
Ann Muir: ‘Ebru by the sheet’
Ann Muir was a skilled craftswoman whose marbled papers gained her an international reputation. Ann, who died last month, worked for many years from her studio at St Algar’s Yard, in Frome, Somerset. Ann's skill in reproducing historical designs and patterns was remarkable. In cases of sympathetic repair work or rebinding, Ann was able to receive a scrap of old paper through the post and return it with two or more full sheets in the same style and colourways, often within a couple of weeks. As Ann's reputation grew, opportunities for a more imaginative use of her talent flourished; she...