Hello from Backspace Book Arts. There are two spaces still available
for The Ideal Album to be taught by Dominic Riley on Sat, May 6 10 -4
at Backspace Book  Arts in Venice Ca.
Don't miss this opportunity to work with a master and learn to make a
very special photo album. Designed by Paul Del Rue, this is a no sew
album of beauty and flexibility. $125 all materials included. Please
visit our website for photographs and a lovely and  more eloquent
description of this book. Beginners are welcome. Thank you, Marcia
Moore 310-722-9004
(sorry the Sunday sketch book class is full)

Tracey Morris <tmorris@...> wrote:

Date: Tue, 02 May 2006 11:35:38 -0700
From: Tracey Morris <tmorris@...>
To: traceyamorris@...
Subject: [LACN] (SURVEY) LA/Bay Area Artists (fwd)



Dear California Artist,



We are conducting a web-based survey of how Los Angeles and Bay Area

artists develop artistic work across commercial, non-profit and

community sectors. Our study, for the James Irvine and Hewlett

Foundations, is endorsed by the Los Angeles Arts Commission, the City of

Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Alliance for California

Traditional Arts, the Durfee, Flintridge, Haas, and San Francisco

Foundations, and the many artists' organizations who helped us reach

you.



We are trying to reach as many musicians, writers, performing artists

and visual artists as possible. What's in it for artists? The chance to

tell us how your artistic work bridges these sectors, to share with us

your own story as an artist and to recommend ways that the barriers

between the commercial, non-profit and community arts worlds can be

broached.



The survey should take about 20 minutes. We are awarding ten $100

prizes by lottery for participants. Our research design, approved by the

human subjects protocol at the University, guarantees anonymity for

respondents and protection of all email addresses from any other use. We

will use this same route to notify you of our resulting study and its

availability for free on our website.



To take the survey, please go to the following website:

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2259FHEVHMQ



Within a week or so, there will be a Spanish language version available

- please see the zoomerang website to find out about that.



Please pass this on to other Los Angeles and Bay Area artists you

know.



Thank you so much!



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]








[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

----- Original Message -----
From: hiromi
To: jill@...
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2006 3:35 PM
Subject: Up coming workshop - Fish Print


Dear HPI email subscribers:

Greetings from HPI.

Here is an announcement for our upcoming workshop:


The art of Gyotaku -an introduction to Fish Printing
with Mineo Ryuka Yamamoto

Date: Jun. 25th, 2006

Where: at HPI retail store in Bergamot Station

Fee: $70.00 all materials included

2 Sessions limited to 12 attendants each

part1:  10:00am - 12:30pm

part2:  1:00pm - 3:30pm


You can see more details at:

http://www.hiromipaper.com/workshop/Workshop-fishprint.htm


1-866-HP WASHI


Have a wonderful day!!


Hiromi Paper International
www.hiromipaper.com




--
To unsubscribe from this list visit this link

To update your preferences visit this link






[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

A new wave of 8 dissolving books (including Halliburton Code of Ethics, =
The Ex-Boyfriend Yearbook, and a volume which documents the life and death =
of a a Tootsie Roll Pop) may be viewed at:

http://english.boisestate.edu/ttrusky/dissolving.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
--------------------

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CALL FOR ARTISTS:

The Art Interview - 5th International Online Artist Competition will
be open for entries from April 1st to July 31st. The competition is a
quarterly, international, juried exhibition of paintings, drawings
and sculptures in any medium. It is open to all living artists
worldwide aged 16 and up. A European gallery exhibition and a total
of ? 17,000 in cash may be awarded each quarter to the first, second
and third place winners. First place winners receive up to ? 10,000
plus a featured interview in Art Interview Online Magazine.

    The competition is run completely over the Internet, which
eliminates the need for you to send slides or arrange for physical
transportation of your artworks. Gain international recognition for
your artwork and be interviewed along with the world's top artists,
curators and gallery owners in Art Interview Online Magazine.

    Read more information on the competition and how to enter it at
www.art-interview.com!





2------------Copyright

What is the typical cost range for a use fee?

How much information should be included in a letter requesting
permission
from a publisher?

Do you include information in the request letter on the intended
market for
the completed pieces? (For example, if I plan to make an original
work from
which I will have 500 prints made and then sell the prints through
various
local gift shop vendors, does the publisher need to know that plan?
Do they
need to know the specifics on the intended shops?)

Do I have to provide any sort of mock-up or description of the
calligraphy
piece I have planned?

If the calligraphy piece using the copyrighted text is a commissioned
work
for an individual, do you state the name of your client?

What is a typical turn-around time for hearing "yes or no" from a
publisher?
Kate




--
I have just been through a six-week-long "task" of trying to get
copyright
permission for four quotes.  We plan to use one of the quotes on a
tote bag
and sell these as a fund raiser for our guild.

As of this date, I've received permission to use "two" of the quotes and
they are "not" charging a fee for using these. They do not want to
see rough
drafts, nor see the final product.

I am still waiting to hear back about the other two quotes. Based on
this
experience, it would seem you should expect at least 2-3 months to get
copyright permission.

I gave them "all" the information in my initial message. I told them
how we
would use it, how many tote bags we would have made, the way we would be
selling these, the name and address of our guild, the name of the
person who
would be doing the calligraphy, and how we would have it printed.
Wilma




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...featured in today's issue of BibliOdyssey:
http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/05/spirit-books.html

create 2 zines with 2 different bindings...side sewn and piano hinge...details
on the Los
Angeles Book Arts Center website under class listings...hope to see you there!

A long article in the NYT Magazine about the current state of
projects for digitizing the world's books:
     http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html
titled Scan This Book! by KEVIN KELLY.

"Despite the opposition of publishers and their lawyers, the world's
texts are being electronically copied, digitized, searched and
linked. And everything we thought we knew about books is going to
change."

Lots to think about.



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Hey all,

I've begun to think about a new body of work for an upcoming solo
exhibition at Vespine Gallery in October and would like to ask for your
help.  If you have some time to ruminate and answer a few questions for
me, I'd be forever grateful, and of course, you'd go down in the annals
of history as one who assisted in creation of artwork, a true patron.
  :)

The dictionary defines 'longing' as "to feel a strong desire or craving
especially for something not likely to be attained" and provides as
synonyms for the verb form (to long) such words as yearn, hanker,
thirst, hunger, and pine, and also states that to long for something
implies a strong desire, a wishing with one's whole heart.

The questions I've been pondering have to do with longing.  What does
it mean to long for something, for someone?  I look around me and
notice that most of us long for something:  a better, stronger, more
sympathetic America, a different place to live, a different or easier
time in our lives;  some long for a child, others, for another person,
even others for a certain peace.  What happens after a 'longing' is
achieved?  Does the object longed for itself diminish once it has been
attained?  My questions are of course open-ended, but with your help,
your answers might add to the conversation that has begun in my head
and with my studiomates.  Hopefully, this discussion can continue
through the artwork.

Questions follow.  Please copy and paste in an email if you wish, or,
if you choose to be anonymous, you can just mail me your answers to the
address below.  Please elaborate on your answers if you wish, and thank
you again for your candor, caring, and honesty.  Also, if you'd forward
it to your friends (and their friends and their friends, etc) that
would only add to the work.  thanks.

How do you define 'longing'?
What do you long for in your life?
What is stopping you from pursuing or gaining that or those object(s)
of longing?
Is there something that you desired and now have attained?
What do you think happens when the longing has been satisfied?

If you have any more thoughts on longing, please don't hesitate to add
them here or email (or mail) them to me soon.  If you could send your
answers by September 1, that would be great.  And, thanks again.

Jamie Lou Thome
(still collecting your used, dried tea bags as well).....

address:
6827 N. Greenview #2
Chicago IL 60626

OR
Vespine Gallery and Studios
1907 South Halsted 1st Floor
Chicago IL 60608


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

The student I have been mentoring through the process of making a book for her
poems had to write an essay about working with me.  Here are her questions.  At
the same time, an artist in New Jersey wanted me to say something about my
images in "Death and Other Lives" because she is giving a paper to an art
collectors group about the use of death and memory in artists' books.

So here are my ramblings about art, life, and death. (Yahoo groups won't let
attachments be sent so it has to be in the body of the email.  Sorry.)

Jill

Essay questions from Shawna for Jill

   Training and schooling:

  My Bachelor of Fine Art degree is from The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago.  It is considered one of the finest art schools in the country.  I
studied studio art there, because I had already taken lots of art history
classes at the University of Chicago. Going to the Art Institute was good for
me, because it was wonderful to be around so many artists.  I never would have
know what artists were like if I had stayed in academia.  Artists are a funny
lot; if you are one you feel like you are finding your tribe when you finally
find a place that honors the way you think.

  Past Projects -see The Meaning and Making of "Death and Other Lives."

  Current Projects - see same.

  What is my philosophy of art and life?

  Make a good life and you can make good art.  The conventional mythology that an
artist is tortured and dysfunctional is silly - most working artists are just
that, working.  It takes work every day to make art.  You have to make a lot of
bad art to make good art - basically you have to make a lot of art.

  If you produce a lot the art will take care of itself.  Don't worry about being
creative or novel - good work is done in groundbreaking ways and in traditional
ways.  The most important things you can do are to make yourself a space to work
in and create time to work. You have to protect both from encroachments.

  Once you have a space and some time, you have to decide how you like to work -
do you want to work big or small?  Wet or dry?  Tight or loose?  Do you want to
sit at a desk and draw, or be outside in a haze of marble dust chipping away on
a huge sculpture?

  I found that one thing I love is having my hands be wet. I make paper partly
because I love the feel of the wet pulp.  I like standing up, outside, with my
hands in vats of abaca or cotton or hemp, pulling sheet after sheet of paper.
When I paint I often use my hands instead of brushes (I protect them so my skin
doesn't absorb the chemicals from the paints.)  When I decorate papers I always
start out with a brush, but before long I am slopping about with the paste on my
hands.  (I don't even have a dishwasher because I like the feeling of suds on my
hands - and it is a great way to get all those paint bits out from my cuticles.)
I didn't get into art thinking I like my hands wet, but over time I gravitated
to those things that are kinesthetically satisfying.  If I had another life to
live, I might explore ceramics because that is also an art form where your hands
are wet much of the time.

  I balance this with drawing and calligraphy, which is dry and is done sitting
down inside.  It helps to have several art forms so you can always be working on
something.

  Finally, you have to discover and protect that which has meaning to you.  It
can be conventional, like flowers; or strange, like graphic novels.  The only
reason to do art is to hear yourself: you have an idea, a feeling, a need, and
you amplify it - for yourself mostly.  If you want to sell your work or get
accolades, fine - go for it.  But if you want to keep working as an artist all
your life you have to learn to hear your own deepest thoughts, and express them
whether anyone likes them or not.  Chances are you can find other artists who
like your work.  More importantly, surround yourself at least part of the time
with artists who understand your need to work.  People who understand the
process are much more valuable than people who like what you do.  For one thing,
your work may change, but the process of making it will stay the same if you
have successfully made a life where working is a regular thing.

  What advice can I give to a young artist?

  I give everyone the same advice no matter what a person's age.  Another myth of
our culture is that art, music and languages are learned better when a person is
young.  Better than what?  If you want to do something, do it.  Conventional
wisdom is, well, conventional.  It takes courage to try things differently but
courage is learned by practice.  Anyone, everyone, has a place at the table of
art (music, dance, theater, writing.)  Talent is a vastly overrated quality,
because talent without work is just a flash in time.  We can each tap into the
wellspring of art through our own effort.  If you are doing what you love, you
will love to keep doing it.  Find that voice in yourself and mine it: it takes
work to get out the gold but it is work that is so worth doing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
----------------------------------------------------------------

The Making and Meaning of "Death and Other Lives"

  Mothers act like little Smithsonian museums in their families.  They collect,
conserve, and curate evidence that tells the story they want to be remembered of
family life.  This can be done with furniture, silverware, linens, china, or
clothes, but often the memory keepers are on paper.  Photographs, report cards,
birth/marriage/death certificates, awards, drawings, greeting cards, articles in
the newspaper, graduation diplomas - every mother I know has a collection of
these she keeps for her family.  Every woman who is not a mother probably has a
mother or grandmother who did this for her family.  It is the woman's job - not
her husband's - to archive all this stuff.  Her husband keeps up the house, the
cars, and the lawn mower.  He doesn't bother tucking cards with birthday wishes
into scrapbooks - that is unimportant in a man's world.

  The more organized women use commercial scrapbooks to keep their treasures. 
These can be dime store versions or they can cost hundreds of dollars to make. 
The time involved can be as brief as putting photos in sleeves or as laborious
as spending weeks making each page.  (A multi-billion dollar business has grown
up around this urge, which is remarkable if only because the family is being
memorialized like never before at the same time the pundits are predicting its
demise.) At the other end of the spectrum are mothers who just throw the stuff
they want to keep for posterity into boxes and bureau drawers all
higgledy-piggledy.  As you wade through this unedited mass of memorabilia, you
are assaulted by images coming at you in random fashion.

  My grandmother did both.  When she died we found a lifetime of correspondence
stuffed into cubicles of roll-top desks, filling bureau drawers, crammed in
shoeboxes in her closet.  Since her husband was the impresario of the slide
shows they gave after each trip abroad, those pieces of the memory stream were
well catalogued.  Everything else was just kept, unedited, in piles and bundles.

  The one remarkable exception was a book of black pages and a cardboard cover
embossed with the word "Memories."  Held together by a decorative string looped
several times through the covers, it positively sprouted with evidence of her
pleasure making this book.  Tellingly, it documents her life before she was
married.

  This memory journal has photos, of course - tiny brown tone photos of co-eds at
Cornell, where she majored in Home Economics, as well as pictures of her in the
boat she crewed on, young men in suits standing before houses that show the
Greek letters of their fraternity, pictures of lakes and rafts and swimming
holes, a few of a mob slithering in mud ("hazing of freshman" is what the
caption says.)  Her girl friends have the short bobbed haircuts and
just-below-the-knee dresses of the 1920's.  Everyone smiles at the camera - the
solemnity of Victorian era portraits has given way to the new conventions of the
snapshot.

  There is more in this lively journal: menus from The Sweet Shoppe, with the 5
cent sundae circled; dance cards on silk ribbons with every boy's name in ink of
a slightly different color; engraved calling cards, crude drawings satirizing
professors; enigmatic notes ("he's not telling"), graduation programs, and even
a lipstick-laden cigarette butt taped to a faded napkin from Lucky's Bar.


This lavish display of my grandmother's interests is the only evidence I have of
her as a self-directed individual.  In every memory I have she is serving her
family, and everything she did creatively from then on was for them: house
decorating, food preparation, gift and greeting card selection, present
wrapping, clothes shopping, table setting, holiday decor.  My grandmother,
Dorothy Cushman Littlewood, had a certain flair about the way she dressed, but
though I have the jewelry she loved I cannot bring to life her style.

  Her Memory book has become a talisman for me, and it has shaped my life as an
artist.

  As an undergraduate, I attended Benningon, the University of Chicago, and the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  I learned much about the art world in
these schools, but I never learned to value anything that came from the women in
my family.  I would never have thought to mine the work of my grandmother that I
held so dear if I hadn't moved to Los Angeles in 1976 searching for the Feminist
Art Studio created by Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven and Miriam Shapiro.  I missed
its flowering but in its wake it left behind the Woman's Building and the
Women's Studio Workshop.  I took classes in printing from Susan King, book
structures from Heidi Kyle, and saw books used as performance art by Susan
Share.  More importantly, I learned I could (and should) tap into my own life
experiences as the basis of my art.  I learned that the creative expressions of
my grandmother's generation had been ignored, even denigrated, no matter how
skillfully things were made (quilting, embroidery, needlework, weaving). 
Putting those ideas together I decided to make my own memory books, filling them
with art as I made it - drawings, collages, letterpress experiments, and
writings.  These were the museum of my mind, and no future generation of girls
could say I left nothing personal behind.

  To pursue what I thought would become a career as a book artist, I got my own
press and named it "Nightflight Press".  I studied Chinese and Western
calligraphy, and went almost daily to life drawing classes.  Eventually I
decided all this needed a focus, and I thought I would like to publish a book my
husband had written called The Death Cantos.  J was a resident at County
Hospital in Los Angeles, reputed to be the largest hospital in the Western
Hemisphere.  People died there daily and the chaos and craziness of the
emergency room took its toll on everyone.  We were new to Los Angeles and had
few friends, so when he came home from a 48-hour shift he would tell me about
the sad and terrifying world he worked in.  It made me feel crazy and scared on
the many days he was gone, and I finally asked him to write the stories down
instead of telling them to me.  He did - one a day for weeks.  In the end he had
what I thought of as a priceless treasure for a future archeologist to excavate.
I knew that the only way such a book would last into the future would be if it
was printed on good paper.  So I added papermaking to the list of things I was
learning, and I used his book as an organizing principle for me to work on.  A
ten-year project is what I designed, enough time for me to get good at all the
parts of making this book: printing, typography, calligraphy, papermaking,
bookbinding, and illustration.

  My idea for the illustrations came from a love of bones and a love of
scientific illustration.  The emotional overload of the stories needed to be
offset by the coolness of scientific illustration, and bones were the perfect
subjects for a book about death.  I drew a few bones I had lying around, took
them to the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits (which housed the largest
collection of fossil bones in the world) and asked if I could see a curator. 
Luckily for me, the curator they sent out went for my scheme: I volunteered to
draw bones one day a week for him if he would give me back the drawings after
using them for his publications.  We started, and I drew for several years in a
fishbowl where the public watched as I turned sketches into fully shaded, highly
detailed renderings. Meanwhile, I was working part time as a student intern at
the L.A. County Graphics Department doing calligraphy for the scrolls they
presented.  Eventually the bones won and I was working on a grant from National
Geographic for five years doing bone drawings at the L.A. Museum of Natural
History.

  Turning 34 and finishing this grant, I decided I couldn't wait any longer to
start a family.  Life trumped Death and The Death Cantos fell into the shadows
as the raucous life of raising three children and home schooling them took over.
Suddenly I was making art in tiny bits of time, and I fully understood why
patchwork quilts are the ultimate mom art: if you have 10 minutes you can sew
the side of a patch; if your toddler falls down in minute seven you can put the
work down and pick it back up when the crisis is over.  You have to fit anything
you do for yourself in between laundry, cooking, reading out loud, scrubbing
kids in showers, shopping, playing tickle monster, and just hanging out looking
for faces in clouds.  A quilt will eventually become a memory blanket - since I
don't sew I made things with bits of paper to hold these moments of time: cards,
collages, pages for albums.  The importance of recording the fleeting life of
childhood became clear, and I began to save all the family memorabilia I could. 
I saved the locks of hair from my children's first haircuts, their finger
paintings, the birthday cards from their grandparents.  I kept copies of
articles where they were mentioned in the local newspaper, questions they asked
("Mom, do clowns eat?" "What does 'haywire' mean?" "Why is air clear?") and
their philosophical musings ("Can you be in two places at once?" "Will I ever
die now?"  "Are you old?").  I have drawings of their footprints, handprints and
records of their height as they grew.  Later, when they decided to try school, I
kept their papers and school photographs.

  It is the usual smorgasbord moms keep, and, like my grandmother, I didn't
organize most of it except to put it in boxes.  But for each child I eventually
made a memory book about a special time.  For Laura, it was a six-week trip to
France I took her on when she was six-years old.  For Jordan, it is a photo
album of the plays he was in.  For Eliot it is a travel journey of our trip to
Italy along with other families of homeschoolers.  In all these books I am
trying to weave two strains of bookmaking together: the memorializing of family
life and the constructions of artists' books.  I want my art to reflect my life
and I want to bring art to what has been a conventional display of family
propriety - the scrapbook.

  As my children grew and became more independent, I sought out artists in Santa
Barbara.  I joined one group of book artists that was making a millennium book. 
Called "Threshold", it took four years instead of one and morphed into a book
about time.  The scale was one reason I stayed with it: it was to be a book
sculpture on turnstiles, eventually becoming 32' long and 8' high.  I loved the
look but not the process, and I moved on to working with actors and dancers for
a performance piece called "The Red Dress".  For this I collaborated on a series
of collaged panels that hung in a fluctuating wall 43' long and 10' high. I
finally decided I loved working big but felt hamstrung working on other people's
ideas.  I did a two person show in which I made an accordion book out of panels
that were 8' X 4' - the whole book was 48' long by 8' high, and it was like a
giant scrap book writ large - each panel was covered with decades my drawings
and calligraphy collaged by color.

  In the fall of 2005, with my second child off to college, I knew I needed a big
project to work on.  I had acquired papermaking equipment and was active in the
Friends of Dard Hunter, a national papermaking group.  Now was the time to teach
myself papermaking and pulp painting by doing a lot of it.  I thought about the
collaged panels for "The Red Dress" project and how satisfying it was to see
people interact with my images.  They read the pages like pages of a book, but
they were standing in front of a wall of pages and their involvement was public,
not private.  Where some people were quiet and studious in their attention,
others were boisterous.  They called their friends and family over, and got
strangers to appreciate what they were looking at. This led to a game of
appreciation, as each person showed the others what they liked and everyone
talked and laughed and had a good time.  I'd shown a lot of artists' books on
tables and shelves, and I'd never had my work received like this.  I thought I'd
try it again.

  One of the reasons for working large is so you will be seen.  It is the visual
equivalent of shouting.  And just as shouting doesn't make what you are saying
any more profound, enlarging work doesn't make it better.  But it does show an
intention to be noticed, and it counteracts a basic premise of my grandmother's
life: pay no attention to me.  The corollaries are that it doesn't matter what I
think or what I care about.  Hanging out with moms for years, I could see this
was part of our conditioning: we valued our care-giving skills much more than
anything we created for ourselves.  Our invisibility, and my grandmother's, made
me angry at her and at my own timidity.  I had been making books for years and
yet only a few people had ever seen them.  I decided it was time to dare to do
bigger things.

  The subject matter came after weeks of thinking and noticing what I got
animated about when I talked to other artists.  A news item made me furious for
days. It was about how a Minnesota town confronted its racist past when
postcards surfaced depicting the town elders, as young men, hamming for the
camera around the dangling legs of a lynched black man. I designed a piece about
lynching: you walk through 5,000 black silk strips hanging from a grid, ending
up at a wall of information about the lynchings in America in the last 150
years.  The project never got past the talking/sketching stage but it helped me
realize I wanted to do a piece about death.  And I wanted to do a book you
walked through.  Here I could bring all my feelings about racism and inequity,
which had so colored my childhood in Chicago.  I could take my memories of my
grandfather dying, and the horror of hearing my brother had died in an accident.
I could think out loud about what I feared.

  And what I loved:  one year, I had driven seven hours to San Francisco for a
show of funerary urns. In the fall I helped do altars for Dia de los Muertos.
Many of my books had figures of Death, of dying, of graves.  Weaving my
disparate interests about death seemed daunting, but that is the magic of
scrapbooks: they encompass whatever you put in them.  Grammy's Memory book, the
scrapbooks for my kids, the journals Dan Eldon left behind - they all took
material as it came and put it together.  The job of the artist is to
freeze-frame the torrent of ephemera and shape it.  I thought I would do this on
my next work.

  And so I began.  The project I envisioned took so many leaps of faith it was
almost paralyzing: I'd never made paper on the scale I envisioned, nor had I
pulp-painted very much.  I designed a hinging system to hang paper panels with
hollow stainless steel rods - they were hard to find and cost $500 altogether. 
I was ordering hemp and abaca to make 250 panels 18" X 24" and I had to
guestimate how much to order, plus how much pigment and what kinds.  In the end,
I had spent $2,000 before I had any idea if these plans would really work.


Winter of 2006 I began the project.  Dividing 250 panels into 120 days I came up
with a rhythm whereby I made two panels a day, an image on each side, which
meant four images a day. Besides painting on the wet pulp, I pulled out drawings
and paintings I'd made in the past and embedded them. I went to life drawing and
printmaking classes and made images I could use for the collaged pages.  I used
Victorian photos, old keys, lace and torn silk as evocations of time gone by.  I
read endless books written by anthropologists about funeral rituals around the
world.  I studied mummies and hieroglyphics. I researched angels and devils,
reincarnation theories, time travel, Adam and Eve, serpents, goddesses of the
old world, tomb sculptures. I went through every rubbing I had ever made from a
gravestone and selected those that worked best.  By May I had made 200 panels
and I took a break.

  It is now a year later and I haven't made any new panels.  I have been working
on the partially finished ones and on my calligraphy for the writing I intend to
do on them.  Soon I will be back in my studio for the final round of panel
making.  Then I will show the piece.

  To arrange that, I traveled to Chillicothe, Ohio, this spring.  In October of
this year the Friends of Dard Hunter will have their 25th annual meeting and I
have rented a space to show "Death and Other Lives."  So now I have to finish
it.  It is no accident that the last one-woman show I had was at the Woman's
Building when I was pregnant with my first child. Now, as my last is going off
to college, I will once again hang a one-person show.  This piece is about
death, but I know death is also a beginning.  It can lead to other lives.

  Jill Littlewood, May 5, 2006


















[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

http://susankapuscinskigaylord.blogspot.com/

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

A friend of mine who lives in Los Olivos, CA, has a couple of small
leather family photo albums which are falling apart at the spine.
She's looking for someone in Santa Barbara County who can help with
their repair.  I know some of you have taken the Adult Ed class and
others are accomplished binders of your own work, but I want to refer
her to someone who's interested and qualified to do this type of work
professionally.  If anyone can recommend a local binder who might be
able to assist, I'd appreciate a referral.

Thanks,
Pam
--

__________________________________________________

Pam Maines
pam.maines@...
805-964-6742
__________________________________________________

We sure need a good book binder in this neighborhood.  And I want to alert
everyone that the training at Adult Ed is not what you want for anything of
value, commercial or sentimental.  They use tea to give paper an aged look
(there is tannic acid in tea), Elmer's glue instead of PVA's, and various
practices that sent me flying from those classes because I couldn't stand
seeing any more old editions be damaged in the name of repair.

My information is a few years old so if anyone knows that things have
changed for the better I would love to hear it.

Jill

----- Original Message -----
From: "Pam Maines" <pam.maines@...>
To: <bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:45 AM
Subject: [bookartsconnection] Repairing old bindings


> A friend of mine who lives in Los Olivos, CA, has a couple of small
> leather family photo albums which are falling apart at the spine.
> She's looking for someone in Santa Barbara County who can help with
> their repair.  I know some of you have taken the Adult Ed class and
> others are accomplished binders of your own work, but I want to refer
> her to someone who's interested and qualified to do this type of work
> professionally.  If anyone can recommend a local binder who might be
> able to assist, I'd appreciate a referral.
>
> Thanks,
> Pam
> --
>
> __________________________________________________
>
> Pam Maines
> pam.maines@...
> 805-964-6742
> __________________________________________________
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

I know a professional bookbinder in Santa Barbara. I used to recommend her when
I worked at Chaucer's and everyone was pleased with the results. her name is
June Kelley and her phone number is 687-7234.
She also knows of a bookbinder in Lompoc. The business is called the New Leaf
Bookbindery and the number is 735-6228. I hope this helps,
Kristine Kelly
   ----- Original Message -----
   From: Jill Littlewood
   To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
   Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:56 AM
   Subject: Re: [bookartsconnection] Repairing old bindings


   We sure need a good book binder in this neighborhood.  And I want to alert
   everyone that the training at Adult Ed is not what you want for anything of
   value, commercial or sentimental.  They use tea to give paper an aged look
   (there is tannic acid in tea), Elmer's glue instead of PVA's, and various
   practices that sent me flying from those classes because I couldn't stand
   seeing any more old editions be damaged in the name of repair.

   My information is a few years old so if anyone knows that things have
   changed for the better I would love to hear it.

   Jill

   ----- Original Message -----
   From: "Pam Maines" <pam.maines@...>
   To: <bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com>
   Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 10:45 AM
   Subject: [bookartsconnection] Repairing old bindings


   > A friend of mine who lives in Los Olivos, CA, has a couple of small
   > leather family photo albums which are falling apart at the spine.
   > She's looking for someone in Santa Barbara County who can help with
   > their repair.  I know some of you have taken the Adult Ed class and
   > others are accomplished binders of your own work, but I want to refer
   > her to someone who's interested and qualified to do this type of work
   > professionally.  If anyone can recommend a local binder who might be
   > able to assist, I'd appreciate a referral.
   >
   > Thanks,
   > Pam
   > --
   >
   > __________________________________________________
   >
   > Pam Maines
   > pam.maines@...
   > 805-964-6742
   > __________________________________________________
   >
   >
   >
   >
   > Yahoo! Groups Links
   >
   >
   >
   >
   >
   >
   >
   >



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS

     a..  Visit your group "bookartsconnection" on the web.

     b..  To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
      bookartsconnection-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

     c..  Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks so much, Jill and Kristine, for the quick responses.  I'll
forward them to my friend Sybil.

Pam

--

__________________________________________________

Pam Maines
pam.maines@...
805-964-6742
__________________________________________________

This summer Sara Norquay is offering a printmaking class on Saturdays
12:30-3:30 beginning June 10th and continuing for 6 weeks at the Schott
Center (Adult Ed) print room (23).

The class will be a combo printmaking survey and introductory artist’s book
course. Three printmaking processes will be introduced and the artist may
then choose one of the three processes for an artist’s book.

A $40 materials fee includes paper, plates, ink, and tools. Please be on
time for the very first class.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Are one of the techniques solar printing?  Thanks, Carolk.

-----Original Message-----
From: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sara Norquay
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 9:13 PM
To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [bookartsconnection] Printmaking for Bookartists

This summer Sara Norquay is offering a printmaking class on Saturdays
12:30-3:30 beginning June 10th and continuing for 6 weeks at the Schott
Center (Adult Ed) print room (23).

The class will be a combo printmaking survey and introductory artist's
book
course. Three printmaking processes will be introduced and the artist
may
then choose one of the three processes for an artist's book.

A $40 materials fee includes paper, plates, ink, and tools. Please be on

time for the very first class.

Looking forward to seeing you there!






Yahoo! Groups Links

Yes, the three techniques will be relief, dry point and solar etching.

Sara


>From: "lifsart" <lifsart@...>
>Reply-To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
>To: <bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: RE: [bookartsconnection] Printmaking for Bookartists
>Date: Sat, 20 May 2006 22:36:40 -0700
>
>Are one of the techniques solar printing?  Thanks, Carolk.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
>[mailto:bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Sara Norquay
>Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2006 9:13 PM
>To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
>Subject: Re: [bookartsconnection] Printmaking for Bookartists
>
>This summer Sara Norquay is offering a printmaking class on Saturdays
>12:30-3:30 beginning June 10th and continuing for 6 weeks at the Schott
>Center (Adult Ed) print room (23).
>
>The class will be a combo printmaking survey and introductory artist's
>book
>course. Three printmaking processes will be introduced and the artist
>may
>then choose one of the three processes for an artist's book.
>
>A $40 materials fee includes paper, plates, ink, and tools. Please be on
>
>time for the very first class.
>
>Looking forward to seeing you there!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
>
>

Take a look at this website concerning a collaborative book that 6 of us from
all over the U.S.
created and entered into Etsy's co-production contest.
<http://fantasticemblage.blogspot.com>
If the book is sold all proceeds go to assist the New Orleans library Fund

----- Original Message -----
From: LAGourmet@...
To: Lagourmet@...
Sent: Tuesday, May 30, 2006 11:43 AM
Subject: [LABAC] Summer Book Arts Classes in Los Angeles


The Los Angeles Book Arts Center is very happy to introduce their Saturdays at
Soolip program.  Please contact Dawn Henney at dhenney@...  or
(310) 914-1898 for more information or to sign up for classes.



Saturday, June 3

Saturdays at Soolip

Flag and Tunnel Books

Make two fun book structures based on the accordion fold.  Flag books are
movable books with an almost architectural look.  Tunnel books have a telescopic
quality, allowing the viewer to see the book through the cutouts on each page. 
Recommended for beginners, but everyone is welcome.

West Hollywood

10:00am to 1:00pm

$60 - Nonmembers  $55 - Members

Materials Fee - $10.00 Payable to Instructor




Saturday, June 17

Saturdays at Soolip

Japanese Stab Binding and Long Stitch

Learn two easy sewing techniques.  Long stitch is a simple open spine sewing
technique that creates parallel lines running down the spine of the book. 
Japanese stab bindings can be done in a variety of different patterns to create
decorative spine stitching.  Recommended for beginners, but everyone is welcome.

West Hollywood

10:00am to 1:00pm

$60 - Nonmembers  $55 - Members

Materials Fee - $10.00 Payable to Instructor



The Los Angeles Book Arts Center (LABAC) is dedicated to serving as a creative,
intellectual and technical resource for artists, collectors, dealers, curators
and individuals interested in the book and paper arts. The non-profit Center’s
mission is to help build a strong book arts community in the Los Angeles area by
offering exhibitions, lectures, classes, meetings and continuous online
discussion groups.  LABAC offers a broad range of classes in the book arts,
drawing and calligraphy, paste papers and monoprints, book structures, cases and
boxes, and everything between and beyond. For more information or to
participate, please call 310-657-2616, or visit the LABAC Web site at
www.LABookArts.com.







--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS

   a..  Visit your group "LABAC" on the web.

   b..  To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    LABAC-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

   c..  Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Wow, Jill! Thanks so much for sharing that. Blessings, Linda

Jill Littlewood wrote:
> The student I have been mentoring through the process of making a book for her
poems had to write an essay about working with me.  Here are her questions.  At
the same time, an artist in New Jersey wanted me to say something about my
images in "Death and Other Lives" because she is giving a paper to an art
collectors group about the use of death and memory in artists' books.
>
> So here are my ramblings about art, life, and death. (Yahoo groups won't let
attachments be sent so it has to be in the body of the email.  Sorry.)
>
> Jill
>
> Essay questions from Shawna for Jill
>
>   Training and schooling:
>
>  My Bachelor of Fine Art degree is from The School of the Art Institute of
Chicago.  It is considered one of the finest art schools in the country.  I
studied studio art there, because I had already taken lots of art history
classes at the University of Chicago. Going to the Art Institute was good for
me, because it was wonderful to be around so many artists.  I never would have
know what artists were like if I had stayed in academia.  Artists are a funny
lot; if you are one you feel like you are finding your tribe when you finally
find a place that honors the way you think.
>
>  Past Projects -see The Meaning and Making of "Death and Other Lives."
>
>  Current Projects - see same.
>
>  What is my philosophy of art and life?
>
>  Make a good life and you can make good art.  The conventional mythology that
an artist is tortured and dysfunctional is silly - most working artists are just
that, working.  It takes work every day to make art.  You have to make a lot of
bad art to make good art - basically you have to make a lot of art.
>
>  If you produce a lot the art will take care of itself.  Don't worry about
being creative or novel - good work is done in groundbreaking ways and in
traditional ways.  The most important things you can do are to make yourself a
space to work in and create time to work. You have to protect both from
encroachments.
>
>  Once you have a space and some time, you have to decide how you like to work
- do you want to work big or small?  Wet or dry?  Tight or loose?  Do you want
to sit at a desk and draw, or be outside in a haze of marble dust chipping away
on a huge sculpture?
>
>  I found that one thing I love is having my hands be wet. I make paper partly
because I love the feel of the wet pulp.  I like standing up, outside, with my
hands in vats of abaca or cotton or hemp, pulling sheet after sheet of paper.
When I paint I often use my hands instead of brushes (I protect them so my skin
doesn't absorb the chemicals from the paints.)  When I decorate papers I always
start out with a brush, but before long I am slopping about with the paste on my
hands.  (I don't even have a dishwasher because I like the feeling of suds on my
hands - and it is a great way to get all those paint bits out from my cuticles.)
I didn't get into art thinking I like my hands wet, but over time I gravitated
to those things that are kinesthetically satisfying.  If I had another life to
live, I might explore ceramics because that is also an art form where your hands
are wet much of the time.
>
>  I balance this with drawing and calligraphy, which is dry and is done sitting
down inside.  It helps to have several art forms so you can always be working on
something.
>
>  Finally, you have to discover and protect that which has meaning to you.  It
can be conventional, like flowers; or strange, like graphic novels.  The only
reason to do art is to hear yourself: you have an idea, a feeling, a need, and
you amplify it - for yourself mostly.  If you want to sell your work or get
accolades, fine - go for it.  But if you want to keep working as an artist all
your life you have to learn to hear your own deepest thoughts, and express them
whether anyone likes them or not.  Chances are you can find other artists who
like your work.  More importantly, surround yourself at least part of the time
with artists who understand your need to work.  People who understand the
process are much more valuable than people who like what you do.  For one thing,
your work may change, but the process of making it will stay the same if you
have successfully made a life where working is a regular thing.
>
>  What advice can I give to a young artist?
>
>  I give everyone the same advice no matter what a person's age.  Another myth
of our culture is that art, music and languages are learned better when a person
is young.  Better than what?  If you want to do something, do it.  Conventional
wisdom is, well, conventional.  It takes courage to try things differently but
courage is learned by practice.  Anyone, everyone, has a place at the table of
art (music, dance, theater, writing.)  Talent is a vastly overrated quality,
because talent without work is just a flash in time.  We can each tap into the
wellspring of art through our own effort.  If you are doing what you love, you
will love to keep doing it.  Find that voice in yourself and mine it: it takes
work to get out the gold but it is work that is so worth doing.
>
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------\
----------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The Making and Meaning of "Death and Other Lives"
>
>  Mothers act like little Smithsonian museums in their families.  They collect,
conserve, and curate evidence that tells the story they want to be remembered of
family life.  This can be done with furniture, silverware, linens, china, or
clothes, but often the memory keepers are on paper.  Photographs, report cards,
birth/marriage/death certificates, awards, drawings, greeting cards, articles in
the newspaper, graduation diplomas - every mother I know has a collection of
these she keeps for her family.  Every woman who is not a mother probably has a
mother or grandmother who did this for her family.  It is the woman's job - not
her husband's - to archive all this stuff.  Her husband keeps up the house, the
cars, and the lawn mower.  He doesn't bother tucking cards with birthday wishes
into scrapbooks - that is unimportant in a man's world.
>
>  The more organized women use commercial scrapbooks to keep their treasures. 
These can be dime store versions or they can cost hundreds of dollars to make. 
The time involved can be as brief as putting photos in sleeves or as laborious
as spending weeks making each page.  (A multi-billion dollar business has grown
up around this urge, which is remarkable if only because the family is being
memorialized like never before at the same time the pundits are predicting its
demise.) At the other end of the spectrum are mothers who just throw the stuff
they want to keep for posterity into boxes and bureau drawers all
higgledy-piggledy.  As you wade through this unedited mass of memorabilia, you
are assaulted by images coming at you in random fashion.
>
>  My grandmother did both.  When she died we found a lifetime of correspondence
stuffed into cubicles of roll-top desks, filling bureau drawers, crammed in
shoeboxes in her closet.  Since her husband was the impresario of the slide
shows they gave after each trip abroad, those pieces of the memory stream were
well catalogued.  Everything else was just kept, unedited, in piles and bundles.
>
>  The one remarkable exception was a book of black pages and a cardboard cover
embossed with the word "Memories."  Held together by a decorative string looped
several times through the covers, it positively sprouted with evidence of her
pleasure making this book.  Tellingly, it documents her life before she was
married.
>
>  This memory journal has photos, of course - tiny brown tone photos of co-eds
at Cornell, where she majored in Home Economics, as well as pictures of her in
the boat she crewed on, young men in suits standing before houses that show the
Greek letters of their fraternity, pictures of lakes and rafts and swimming
holes, a few of a mob slithering in mud ("hazing of freshman" is what the
caption says.)  Her girl friends have the short bobbed haircuts and
just-below-the-knee dresses of the 1920's.  Everyone smiles at the camera - the
solemnity of Victorian era portraits has given way to the new conventions of the
snapshot.
>
>  There is more in this lively journal: menus from The Sweet Shoppe, with the 5
cent sundae circled; dance cards on silk ribbons with every boy's name in ink of
a slightly different color; engraved calling cards, crude drawings satirizing
professors; enigmatic notes ("he's not telling"), graduation programs, and even
a lipstick-laden cigarette butt taped to a faded napkin from Lucky's Bar.
>
>
> This lavish display of my grandmother's interests is the only evidence I have
of her as a self-directed individual.  In every memory I have she is serving her
family, and everything she did creatively from then on was for them: house
decorating, food preparation, gift and greeting card selection, present
wrapping, clothes shopping, table setting, holiday decor.  My grandmother,
Dorothy Cushman Littlewood, had a certain flair about the way she dressed, but
though I have the jewelry she loved I cannot bring to life her style.
>
>  Her Memory book has become a talisman for me, and it has shaped my life as an
artist.
>
>  As an undergraduate, I attended Benningon, the University of Chicago, and the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  I learned much about the art world in
these schools, but I never learned to value anything that came from the women in
my family.  I would never have thought to mine the work of my grandmother that I
held so dear if I hadn't moved to Los Angeles in 1976 searching for the Feminist
Art Studio created by Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven and Miriam Shapiro.  I missed
its flowering but in its wake it left behind the Woman's Building and the
Women's Studio Workshop.  I took classes in printing from Susan King, book
structures from Heidi Kyle, and saw books used as performance art by Susan
Share.  More importantly, I learned I could (and should) tap into my own life
experiences as the basis of my art.  I learned that the creative expressions of
my grandmother's generation had been ignored, even denigrated, no matter how
skillfully things were made (quilting, embroidery, needlework, weaving). 
Putting those ideas together I decided to make my own memory books, filling them
with art as I made it - drawings, collages, letterpress experiments, and
writings.  These were the museum of my mind, and no future generation of girls
could say I left nothing personal behind.
>
>  To pursue what I thought would become a career as a book artist, I got my own
press and named it "Nightflight Press".  I studied Chinese and Western
calligraphy, and went almost daily to life drawing classes.  Eventually I
decided all this needed a focus, and I thought I would like to publish a book my
husband had written called The Death Cantos.  J was a resident at County
Hospital in Los Angeles, reputed to be the largest hospital in the Western
Hemisphere.  People died there daily and the chaos and craziness of the
emergency room took its toll on everyone.  We were new to Los Angeles and had
few friends, so when he came home from a 48-hour shift he would tell me about
the sad and terrifying world he worked in.  It made me feel crazy and scared on
the many days he was gone, and I finally asked him to write the stories down
instead of telling them to me.  He did - one a day for weeks.  In the end he had
what I thought of as a priceless treasure for a future archeologist to excavate.
I knew that the only way such a book would last into the future would be if it
was printed on good paper.  So I added papermaking to the list of things I was
learning, and I used his book as an organizing principle for me to work on.  A
ten-year project is what I designed, enough time for me to get good at all the
parts of making this book: printing, typography, calligraphy, papermaking,
bookbinding, and illustration.
>
>  My idea for the illustrations came from a love of bones and a love of
scientific illustration.  The emotional overload of the stories needed to be
offset by the coolness of scientific illustration, and bones were the perfect
subjects for a book about death.  I drew a few bones I had lying around, took
them to the Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits (which housed the largest
collection of fossil bones in the world) and asked if I could see a curator. 
Luckily for me, the curator they sent out went for my scheme: I volunteered to
draw bones one day a week for him if he would give me back the drawings after
using them for his publications.  We started, and I drew for several years in a
fishbowl where the public watched as I turned sketches into fully shaded, highly
detailed renderings. Meanwhile, I was working part time as a student intern at
the L.A. County Graphics Department doing calligraphy for the scrolls they
presented.  Eventually the bones won and I was working on a grant from National
Geographic for five years doing bone drawings at the L.A. Museum of Natural
History.
>
>  Turning 34 and finishing this grant, I decided I couldn't wait any longer to
start a family.  Life trumped Death and The Death Cantos fell into the shadows
as the raucous life of raising three children and home schooling them took over.
Suddenly I was making art in tiny bits of time, and I fully understood why
patchwork quilts are the ultimate mom art: if you have 10 minutes you can sew
the side of a patch; if your toddler falls down in minute seven you can put the
work down and pick it back up when the crisis is over.  You have to fit anything
you do for yourself in between laundry, cooking, reading out loud, scrubbing
kids in showers, shopping, playing tickle monster, and just hanging out looking
for faces in clouds.  A quilt will eventually become a memory blanket - since I
don't sew I made things with bits of paper to hold these moments of time: cards,
collages, pages for albums.  The importance of recording the fleeting life of
childhood became clear, and I began to save all the family memorabilia I could. 
I saved the locks of hair from my children's first haircuts, their finger
paintings, the birthday cards from their grandparents.  I kept copies of
articles where they were mentioned in the local newspaper, questions they asked
("Mom, do clowns eat?" "What does 'haywire' mean?" "Why is air clear?") and
their philosophical musings ("Can you be in two places at once?" "Will I ever
die now?"  "Are you old?").  I have drawings of their footprints, handprints and
records of their height as they grew.  Later, when they decided to try school, I
kept their papers and school photographs.
>
>  It is the usual smorgasbord moms keep, and, like my grandmother, I didn't
organize most of it except to put it in boxes.  But for each child I eventually
made a memory book about a special time.  For Laura, it was a six-week trip to
France I took her on when she was six-years old.  For Jordan, it is a photo
album of the plays he was in.  For Eliot it is a travel journey of our trip to
Italy along with other families of homeschoolers.  In all these books I am
trying to weave two strains of bookmaking together: the memorializing of family
life and the constructions of artists' books.  I want my art to reflect my life
and I want to bring art to what has been a conventional display of family
propriety - the scrapbook.
>
>  As my children grew and became more independent, I sought out artists in
Santa Barbara.  I joined one group of book artists that was making a millennium
book.  Called "Threshold", it took four years instead of one and morphed into a
book about time.  The scale was one reason I stayed with it: it was to be a book
sculpture on turnstiles, eventually becoming 32' long and 8' high.  I loved the
look but not the process, and I moved on to working with actors and dancers for
a performance piece called "The Red Dress".  For this I collaborated on a series
of collaged panels that hung in a fluctuating wall 43' long and 10' high. I
finally decided I loved working big but felt hamstrung working on other people's
ideas.  I did a two person show in which I made an accordion book out of panels
that were 8' X 4' - the whole book was 48' long by 8' high, and it was like a
giant scrap book writ large - each panel was covered with decades my drawings
and calligraphy collaged by color.
>
>  In the fall of 2005, with my second child off to college, I knew I needed a
big project to work on.  I had acquired papermaking equipment and was active in
the Friends of Dard Hunter, a national papermaking group.  Now was the time to
teach myself papermaking and pulp painting by doing a lot of it.  I thought
about the collaged panels for "The Red Dress" project and how satisfying it was
to see people interact with my images.  They read the pages like pages of a
book, but they were standing in front of a wall of pages and their involvement
was public, not private.  Where some people were quiet and studious in their
attention, others were boisterous.  They called their friends and family over,
and got strangers to appreciate what they were looking at. This led to a game of
appreciation, as each person showed the others what they liked and everyone
talked and laughed and had a good time.  I'd shown a lot of artists' books on
tables and shelves, and I'd never had my work received like this.  I thought I'd
try it again.
>
>  One of the reasons for working large is so you will be seen.  It is the
visual equivalent of shouting.  And just as shouting doesn't make what you are
saying any more profound, enlarging work doesn't make it better.  But it does
show an intention to be noticed, and it counteracts a basic premise of my
grandmother's life: pay no attention to me.  The corollaries are that it doesn't
matter what I think or what I care about.  Hanging out with moms for years, I
could see this was part of our conditioning: we valued our care-giving skills
much more than anything we created for ourselves.  Our invisibility, and my
grandmother's, made me angry at her and at my own timidity.  I had been making
books for years and yet only a few people had ever seen them.  I decided it was
time to dare to do bigger things.
>
>  The subject matter came after weeks of thinking and noticing what I got
animated about when I talked to other artists.  A news item made me furious for
days. It was about how a Minnesota town confronted its racist past when
postcards surfaced depicting the town elders, as young men, hamming for the
camera around the dangling legs of a lynched black man. I designed a piece about
lynching: you walk through 5,000 black silk strips hanging from a grid, ending
up at a wall of information about the lynchings in America in the last 150
years.  The project never got past the talking/sketching stage but it helped me
realize I wanted to do a piece about death.  And I wanted to do a book you
walked through.  Here I could bring all my feelings about racism and inequity,
which had so colored my childhood in Chicago.  I could take my memories of my
grandfather dying, and the horror of hearing my brother had died in an accident.
I could think out loud about what I feared.
>
>  And what I loved:  one year, I had driven seven hours to San Francisco for a
show of funerary urns. In the fall I helped do altars for Dia de los Muertos.
Many of my books had figures of Death, of dying, of graves.  Weaving my
disparate interests about death seemed daunting, but that is the magic of
scrapbooks: they encompass whatever you put in them.  Grammy's Memory book, the
scrapbooks for my kids, the journals Dan Eldon left behind - they all took
material as it came and put it together.  The job of the artist is to
freeze-frame the torrent of ephemera and shape it.  I thought I would do this on
my next work.
>
>  And so I began.  The project I envisioned took so many leaps of faith it was
almost paralyzing: I'd never made paper on the scale I envisioned, nor had I
pulp-painted very much.  I designed a hinging system to hang paper panels with
hollow stainless steel rods - they were hard to find and cost $500 altogether. 
I was ordering hemp and abaca to make 250 panels 18" X 24" and I had to
guestimate how much to order, plus how much pigment and what kinds.  In the end,
I had spent $2,000 before I had any idea if these plans would really work.
>
>
> Winter of 2006 I began the project.  Dividing 250 panels into 120 days I came
up with a rhythm whereby I made two panels a day, an image on each side, which
meant four images a day. Besides painting on the wet pulp, I pulled out drawings
and paintings I'd made in the past and embedded them. I went to life drawing and
printmaking classes and made images I could use for the collaged pages.  I used
Victorian photos, old keys, lace and torn silk as evocations of time gone by.  I
read endless books written by anthropologists about funeral rituals around the
world.  I studied mummies and hieroglyphics. I researched angels and devils,
reincarnation theories, time travel, Adam and Eve, serpents, goddesses of the
old world, tomb sculptures. I went through every rubbing I had ever made from a
gravestone and selected those that worked best.  By May I had made 200 panels
and I took a break.
>
>  It is now a year later and I haven't made any new panels.  I have been
working on the partially finished ones and on my calligraphy for the writing I
intend to do on them.  Soon I will be back in my studio for the final round of
panel making.  Then I will show the piece.
>
>  To arrange that, I traveled to Chillicothe, Ohio, this spring.  In October of
this year the Friends of Dard Hunter will have their 25th annual meeting and I
have rented a space to show "Death and Other Lives."  So now I have to finish
it.  It is no accident that the last one-woman show I had was at the Woman's
Building when I was pregnant with my first child. Now, as my last is going off
to college, I will once again hang a one-person show.  This piece is about
death, but I know death is also a beginning.  It can lead to other lives.
>
>  Jill Littlewood, May 5, 2006
>
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>
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>
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>
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>
>
>
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>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
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>

-------------- Dance of the Pen

Very cool thing - A choreographer in Taiwan is turning
calligraphy
into dance - literally, the dance of the pen. Very very
cool - go to
cnn.com and see the video.
Rebecca



--
It IS a cool video--thanks for sending it, rebecca.....
here's the direct link to the article on cnn--- -then
you'll have to
click on "watch the video" to the right. be warned,
though---- you'll
get a long and loud commercial for zantac before the
actual video comes
up. you might want to use your mute button until the real
thing
starts....

http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/05/21/forward.lin/index.html

leeanne

Wow--very cool!  Thanks for sending this link.  Watching this discussion of
Chinese calligraphy, it really makes me feel the void in Western styles, so
much more stiff and lacking in expressiveness.  So I guess that's why we have
to reinvent it for ourselves.  Are you back yet?  Do you want to see Pamela Z
with me on Friday night at Center Stage? (see www.pamelaz.com)  Are you going
on Thur.?  If any of these are yeses, we'll talk more soon. :j Jeanette

------ Original Message ------
Received: Wed, 31 May 2006 09:15:24 PM PDT
From: <jill@...>
To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [bookartsconnection] calligraphic dance

-------------- Dance of the Pen

Very cool thing - A choreographer in Taiwan is turning
calligraphy
into dance - literally, the dance of the pen. Very very
cool - go to
cnn.com and see the video.
Rebecca



--
It IS a cool video--thanks for sending it, rebecca.....
here's the direct link to the article on cnn--- -then
you'll have to
click on "watch the video" to the right. be warned,
though---- you'll
get a long and loud commercial for zantac before the
actual video comes
up. you might want to use your mute button until the real
thing
starts....

http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/05/21/forward.lin/index.html

leeanne

Oops, sorry, I meant to be sending this just to Jill. :j

------ Original Message ------
Received: Wed, 31 May 2006 11:13:00 PM PDT
From: "Jeanette Mustacich" <jmustacich@...>
To: <bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: [bookartsconnection] calligraphic dance

Wow--very cool!  Thanks for sending this link.  Watching this discussion of
Chinese calligraphy, it really makes me feel the void in Western styles, so
much more stiff and lacking in expressiveness.  So I guess that's why we have
to reinvent it for ourselves.  Are you back yet?  Do you want to see Pamela Z
with me on Friday night at Center Stage? (see www.pamelaz.com)  Are you going
on Thur.?  If any of these are yeses, we'll talk more soon. :j Jeanette

------ Original Message ------
Received: Wed, 31 May 2006 09:15:24 PM PDT
From: <jill@...>
To: bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [bookartsconnection] calligraphic dance

-------------- Dance of the Pen

Very cool thing - A choreographer in Taiwan is turning
calligraphy
into dance - literally, the dance of the pen. Very very
cool - go to
cnn.com and see the video.
Rebecca



--
It IS a cool video--thanks for sending it, rebecca.....
here's the direct link to the article on cnn--- -then
you'll have to
click on "watch the video" to the right. be warned,
though---- you'll
get a long and loud commercial for zantac before the
actual video comes
up. you might want to use your mute button until the real
thing
starts....

http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/05/21/forward.lin/index.html

leeanne

News from Backspace Book Arts in delightful Venice California

Saturday July 15 OR  Sunday July 30 9-4 Book Binding for Book Artists.
$125 All materials included
An intensive one day course designed to present as many structures as
possible for making artists' books. Content development, materials
and other resources will be discussed. Check the Backspace Book arts
website for a more complete description or call Marcia Moore for more
information.

Letterpress Basics -Marcia Brown
$100 All materials included.
Learn the basics of letterpress printing using the three platen
presses at Backspace. Typesetting, composition and press technology
will be discussed. Students will print a variety of  small cards.
Class size is extremely limited. Please call Marcia Moore to arrange
a date.

Marcia Moore is off to The Paper and Book Intensive held this year in
La Porte, Indiana Backspace will be opened with the wonderful Chuva
Featherstone holding down the fort. Please call ahead to make sure
she is there. 310-722-9004

The past few weeks have been full of exciting classes and events.
Gabriel Fox taught a wonderful workshop for the Guild of Bookworkers
which I attended. Gabrielle is a thoughtful and tireless teacher and
the miniature books we made were innovative and inspiring.
The workshop was held at Kater Krafts book bindery in Pico Rivera and
generously hosted by Bruce Kavin, son of the late Mel Kavin.  Bruce
shared his father's collection of miniature books with extraordinary
designer bindings. An incredible weekend.

Domiinic Riley came to Venice  to teach two one day workshops at
Backspace Book Arts. Titled the Ideal Album and Sketchbook, students
were treated to the Dominic Riley haute style of bookbinding and
wonderful books were made. These classes were designed for both the
novice and the more advanced student and  many new techniques were
presented that offered endless opportunities for future work. Check
the pictures up on our website.

Then, as if those two events were not enough, Los Angeles was treated
to a wonderful talk by Kitty Maryatt. Hosted by Otis college of Art
and Design and The Los Angeles Book Arts Center, Kitty talked about
her work in book arts and fine binding, her early education in
calligraphy and the many things that inspire and inform her work. It
was truly an exciting, informative and inspirational talk.

Be sure to drop by Backspace to see the beautiful, unique books in
the gallery. These works are one of a kind made by "plain people" not
book binders or artists. Books incorporating human hair, pressed
flowers, autographs and other symbols of love, affection and school
work.

I finally got there today.  What a cool place.  Here is a website from some fun
stuff my
daughter and I  saw.
http://www.bzdesignstuff.com/2inchart

Syd

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Bannister" <tom@...>
To: <pagetwo@...>
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 9:07 AM
Subject: BOOKARTS.COM domain name and online book arts publications for
sale:


>
> Page Two, Inc., the owners of Book Arts Classified and Book Arts
> Directory, first published in 1992 and currently published online at
> www.BookArts.com, are looking to sell the publications. Prospective
> buyers should contact Tom@... for details.
>
>

DO NOT USE YOUR EMAIL REPLY FUNCTION TO RESPOND TO THIS ANNOUNCEMENT.

PLEASE RESPOND TO  <mailto:orders@...> orders@...





A Chinese version for the ILAB website



www.ilab.org



The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers is very pleased to
announce the launch of a Chinese version of its website (joining with the
English, German and French versions). We are the first and only major
bookselling site to welcome Chinese customers to the world of books in their
own language.



Best wishes

Bob Fleck

President, ILAB





Une version chinoise du site de la LILA



www.ilab.org



La Ligue Internationale de la Librairie Ancienne est heureuse de vous
annoncer le lancement d'une version chinoise de son site internet (qui vient
s'ajouter aux versions anglaise, française et allemande). Ce site est le
premier site de livres au monde à proposer un accueil aux clients chinois
dans leur propre langue.



Cordialement

Bob Fleck

Président, LILA







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Look at the Robert Lang and Satoshi Kamiya sites (toward the bottom of the
list). All figures are one sheet, no tears or cuts. Kamiya does his without
computer assistance.

http://www.fishgoth.com/origami/links.html


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks, Jill, this is a terrific site.  Jeanette

------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:44:47 AM PDT
From: "Jill Littlewood" <jill@...>
To: <bookartsconnection@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [bookartsconnection] amazing origami

Look at the Robert Lang and Satoshi Kamiya sites (toward the bottom of the
list). All figures are one sheet, no tears or cuts. Kamiya does his without
computer assistance.

http://www.fishgoth.com/origami/links.html


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]





Yahoo! Groups Links