“Art ought to be a troublesome thing, and one of my reasons for painting representationally is that this makes for much more troublesome pictures.” David Park (posted on the wall above his paintings in the Oakland Museum of California.)
Carbon is a show at The Vestibule gallery in Seattle. I hung one of my burned tree paintings on the wall and installed a “fire pit” on the floor below it. The stone circle contains objects evoking the top carbon-emitting sectors: energy production, transportation, and agriculture, with a chunk of concrete for the built environment as one member of the ring of stones. There is an opening/performance 9/10 starting at 6 pm that I will attend.
Carved Out, Varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52”H x 10”W (shown rotated)Fire pit, installation, ~30” in diameter (that is a gas pump handle, not a pistol!)
I’m happy to be in Lynn Hanson Gallery’s annual ICON show again with both a burned tree painting and a bark beetle book. There is a Seattle reception there 2-4 pm, also on 9/10, that I plan to attend.
Left top and bottom: Bark Beetle Book Volume XXXIII: Hyphae Half-round log, handmade and commercial papers, abaca fiber; 14”H x 6”W x 8”D plus. extended fibers Right: Twisted, Varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52H x 21”W
The Magnitude of the Problem, digitally printed on fabric in three layers: solid, transparent (left, seen from the front,) and text on black (right, seen from back). The text is Lorena Williams’ story of visiting the threatened Mariposa Grove. (In the background is one of Amiko Matsuo’s innovative Phos-Chek paintings.)
I had the pleasure of being a resident at the Mineral School in early August. I finished two new burned tree paintings and still managed to get out to nearby Mount Rainier for hikes and seven small landscape paintings.
Patrol Cabin at Lake George, The Mountain from Mineral Lake and The Mountain from High Rock, all watercolor on 11” x 15” paper
In June I gave an in-person talk in Twisp, WA, as a 2022 Mary Kiesau Community Fellowship recipient. In September-October I will be heading back to the Methow Valley to begin my listening project: to community members, naturalists, and activists about the 2021 fires. I will also explore the burns themselves. I expect hearing from the people most involved and affected to influence my future artwork.
At the end of October, I’ll be installing the Magnitude of the Problem painting in the Shunpike Storefrontwindow at Mercer and TerryStreets in South Lake Union, Seattle, where it will be until the end of January 2023.
Here it is during my Six-fold Increase exhibit at Plasteel in July-August.
After that I’m looking forward to a quiet spell into early 2023 where I can focus creating on new work!
Six-Fold Increase:I’ll show burned tree paintings, including a number of new ones and the 21.5-foot Magnitude of the Problem, at Plasteel Frames & Gallery in the Design Center in July-August. There will be an opening reception July 14 from 5 – 8 pm. (Seattle WA)
Larger than Life, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 51.5”H x 28”W; 2022 (Shown rotated)
Carbon: The Vestibule Gallery is assembling a topical exhibit for September; I will be showing both a burned tree painting and a small installation about carbon emissions. (Seattle WA)
Carved Out, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 51.5”H x 10”W; 2022. (Shown rotated)
Kirkland Arts Center will be showing 3 of my bark beetle books as part of The Truth is Out There August 24 – October 29, with a reception August 26, 6-8 pm, including the recent collaboration with composer Aldo Daniel Rivera Rentería, who composed a short suite for “What the Beetles Sang.” Listen to it here! (Kirkland WA)
Bark Beetle Book Volume 39, Laser-engraved log slices with Douglas Fir pole beetle galleries (Scolytus monticolae), antique wooden violin clamps
Art that Matters to the Planet is an exhibit at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute July 27– October 30. I assumed they would pick one of my submissions and they asked for six: three burned trees and three bark beetle books! (Jamestown NY)
In Magnuson Park there is a second annual plein air festival. I have two paintings in the exhibit (second floor of the administration building) and will give a demonstration outside the Building 30 front door at noon on July 2. (Seattle WA)
South Park Crane, watercolor on paper, 11” x 15”
The Anacortes Arts Festival juried show has again chosen some of my burned trees, including the complex Deep Creek Triplet and the recent Montana Sandblasted. The Festival runs August 5-7 but the juried gallery opens July 30. However, I will be at a Mineral School residency then and not present for the reception. (Anacortes WA)
Deep Creek Triplet with detail view, 51.5”H x 31”W; varnished watercolor on laser-cut polypropylene, 2021.
The Puget Sound Book Artists’annual membership exhibit includes What the Beetles Wrote and Below the Bark, in which I used padded fabric printed with my painting of Ponderosa bark as a metaphor for the structure of trees. The show is currently on at the Collins Library, University of Puget Sound, until August 5 (Tacoma WA).
Science Stories, a traveling book arts show curated by Lucia Harrison, will be opening at Whitman College’s Penrose Library in August, then travels to The Evergreen State College January-March 2023. (Walla Walla, WA then Olympia WA)
Bark Beetle Volume 34:Resource Competition Branch with galleries; “blue-stained” dimensional lumber, laser-cut Baltic birch plywood, with laser print transfers, Kevlar thread. 5″H x 12.75″W x 4″D.
Based on a remark by entomologist Kenneth Raffa, that both humans and beetles like to make their homes from wood, thus we are competing for the same resource. This video about the book shows its morph from beetle-galleried-branch to dimensional lumber.
Also current, The Wildling Museum continues Fire and Ice until September 26. My co-collaborator Lorena Williams and I will be doing an online talk September 15. The registration link isn’t posted yet but check in mid-August. (Solvang CA and everywhere).
The State of the Forest grove of fabric trees, which has been touring with Environmental Impact II since 2019 just opened at Northwest Michigan College. It will go on to two more stops before finishing at the Detroit Zoo in 2023. (Traverse City MI)
In other news, I’m looking forward to a brief residency, postponed from 2020, that is a joint project of Parks Canada, the Alpine Club of Canada and the Revelstoke Visual Arts Centre in July — and likewise at the aforementioned Mineral School in early August. In September/October I am truly excited to begin my stay in the Methow Valley for the Mary Kiesau Community Fellowship.
In the back-and-forth process of ideas and versions, she suggested I paint a portrait of some Ponderosa bark in the absence of any available locally. I did so and the suggestion continues to bear fruit (cones?) …
First I used it printed on fabric for the cover of a book earlier this winter:
Bark Beetle Book Volume XXXVIII: Below the Bark The padded fabric is a “quilt” cover on the wood, with beetle galleries visible through the “title window,” as if it were a school paper in a folder.
More recently I’ve been working with a young composer on the East Coast, Aldo Daniel Rivera Renteria; I was referred to him by the office manager of the laser cutters I usually work with, Laser Fremont in Seattle. I wanted to do something with these mysterious wooden clamps we found:
Volume XXXIX: What the Beetles Sang
They turned out to be violin clamps. If you’re out in the country in Norway, you make your own folk violin, doesn’t everybody?!? I knew of book forms in India that use large wood screws to hold sheets of painted wood in boxes, so I felt totally legit using them as a binding.
I once again used the Ponderosa bark painting for a folio that contains the score, both a handwritten page (laser cut on the inside wood pages) and the “typeset” formal score:
Bark Beetle Book Volume XL: The Orchestration of Climate The cover is printed paper over book boards, the inside wood pages were laser-engraved with some of Aldo’s handwritten notation, and the separate stitched folio is the formal score.
It was a thrill to work with Aldo whose skills are so different than my own! Every collaboration, to date with with foresters, entomologists, poets, papermakers, letterpress printers and now a composer takes me down new creative paths – talk about a gift that keeps on giving!
Our pandemic days call for superpowers of persistence, patience and kindness. Pass those gifts on!
In the Rear-View Mirror: I’m once again happy to be part of Mighty Tieton’s 10x10x10 competition; it’s up until 10/10/21 (do you suppose that date was on purpose?!) (Tieton WA)
In August, I taught a second weekend workshop for Gage Academy at the Bloedel Reserve with a great group of people. I’m planning on teaching an in-person indoor class in the second half of October, exact date still TBD—as is the in-person part…
The Magnitude of the Problem, varnished watercolor on torn paper, 50″H x 21.5′ W in 7 panels.
Coincidentally, the City of Auburn’s Art on Main program is showing a digitally-printed fabric version of the same tree, in a different orientation, in a downtown storefront. (Auburn WA)
The Art Gallery of SnoValley still has some landscapes of mine now through September. (Snoqualmie, WA) ART GALLERY OF SNOVALLEY – HOME. (Snohomish WA)
On the book arts front, I have work in several exhibits: Puget Sound Book Arts membership exhibit at the University of Puget Sound Collins Library (Tacoma WA) and Movable Medley at the Art Students League until November 7 (Denver CO). After the PSBA membership exhibit, which ends Oct 1, Lucia Harrison’s Science Stories will occupy the Collins Library. All the pieces are part of my lengthy obsession with bark beetles—if their chewed trails look like an unknown script, what better form than a book?
I remain incredibly excited about Below the Bark at the Missoula Art Museum opening Oct 1-Feb 26, 2022. Together with printmaker Tim Musso and painter/photographer/book artist Jim Frazer, our exhibit will open on art walk night and we will also deliver a public lecture Oct 4. I’m excited that, among other things, it will be part of a statewide STEM/STEAM program for fifth graders. I will also be a Visiting Artist at the University of Montana Missoula, where I will offer a workshop for art and forestry students and faculty. Entirely coincidentally, State of the Forest will be opening as part of “Environmental Impact II” Oct 8 at the Museum of the Rockies (Bozeman, MT).
Bark Beetle Book Vol. XXVII: Survivorship. Log with mountain pine beetle galleries; letterpress-printed text with inked-in galleries, handmade and commercial Japanese paper; brass binding post. 6″H x 9.5″ diamBased on a paper by Six et al.: ~7% of whitebark pines in a research tract survived mass attack by mountain pine beetles. DNA analyses of the survivors showed they produced fewer defensive chemicals (which the beetles perceive). The proportion of dark, low-contrast (“quiet”) to light, high-contrast (“noisy”) pages in the book is 7/100.
The Confluence Gallery has an upcoming show, “Something in the Wind” Oct 2 – Nov 13. It will include two of my burned tree paintings. (Twisp WA)
Stehekin Sentinel (rotated), varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52″H x 20″W
Also ahead, CoCA’s membership exhibit will include my 2020 burned tree Seamed Nov 4 – Jan 15, 2022. (Seattle WA)
Seamed (rotated), varnished watercolor on torn paper, 52″H x 9.5″W
And then again, who knows in what form these events will take place? Whatever form they take – as-planned, virtual or postponed – I wish you all good health!
(“They” being my series of artist books made from bark-beetle-damaged wood and bark. Warning, this post is almost as long as the process!)
The Idea
I had the idea maybe as long as 4 or 5 months ago. I saw these paragraphs in the introduction to a textbook about bark beetles:
“Bark beetles play key roles in the structure of natural plant communities and large-scale biomes. They contribute to nutrient cycling, canopy thinning, gap dynamics, biodiversity, soil structure, hydrology, disturbance regimes, and successional pathways. Several species in particular can genuinely be designated as ‘landscape engineers,’ in that they exert stand-replacing cross-scale interactions.
In addition to their ecological roles, some bark beetles compete with humans for valued plants and plant products and so are significant forest and agricultural pests. These species cause substantial socioeconomic losses, and at times necessitate management responses. Bark beetles and humans are both in the business of converting trees into homes, so our overlapping economies make some conflict of interest inevitable.”
Kenneth F. Raffa, Jean-Claude Gregoire and B. Staffan Lindgren, Natural History and Ecology of Bark Beetles, Introduction to Chapter 1 Bark Beetles, Elsevier, 2015.
I started thinking about how I could invoke this competition for resources metaphorically. I’d collected some particularly handsome beetle galleries on medium-size branches in the Wenatchee National Forest. And I’d been reading one of Diana Six’s papers on the obligate mutualism of certain fungi to bark beetles – the beetles carry the fungi from one tree to another and the fungi convert some of the elements the beetles need to digest tree wood. Certain species leave a calling card—a greyish tone from the sapwood toward the heartwood, called “blue stain.”
Procuring Materials
I asked a Montana friend who used to manage a timber mill if he could get me any of this wood as dimensional lumber. That took a while, as not every supplier bothers to carry it, since it is not popular in appearance and may have the holes of other kinds of beetles. I didn’t need very much, so it wasn’t hard to ship it to me in Seattle.
I received the dimensional lumber about 10 weeks ago.
Laying Out the Cut
I decided to interpolate the branch shape to the 12-inch length of 1×4 over 16 spreads, or 34 pages, counting the inside front and inside back. I did the drawing in Inkscape and had it laser-cut with 36 binding holes, 9 groups of 4, and included those 1 mm holes in the drawing. Over time, I’ve developed a method for making these interpolations successfully.
My interpolated cutting diagram laid out (remember each page has two sides)
I had some leftover 1/8” Baltic birch plywood from a previous project, so I laid out the cuts to fit it. It probably took me 2 days to make the drawing and its imposition onto the wood sheet. Then it turned out my usual local supplier, Fremont Laser & Design, had changed ownership and moved and was just getting started up again. So that took a little time, too. It was cut about 4 weeks ago.
Prepping the Materials
Oh yeah, there’s also soaking both the branch and the plank in Minwax wood hardener. I do that for several reasons: I once heard a story from a curator about an artist’s “organic” work on display from which emerged an army of live insects. So I want to be sure anything still in there is quite dead. Plus it helps stabilize the wood and prevent any further checking or cracking. And there’s the time I sit in the driveway cleaning the frass out of the galleries with an old toothbrush… So a couple of hours there.
Page Graphics
I faced the problem of what I wanted to show on those pages. They looked good by themselves, but I felt I needed to underline the meaning more strongly. I decided to morph an image of the branch into an image of the dimensional lumber, with each gradually taking over from the other over half the book’s pages. That is, in the first half of the book the bark beetle galleries take up more and more of the page—the beetles are winning; then the lumber becomes an increasing proportion of the page—the humans are competing.
This turned out to be a lot harder than I would have guessed. It was no big deal to photograph the dimensional lumber. But it took me several tries to figure out how to create an image of the branch (which is only ~2 inches wide) that I could use across all the different page widths. I knew I needed to “unwrap” the texture of the branch onto a 4”-wide rectangle. The method that finally worked was to stand the branch up on a lazy susan where 180-degrees were marked off in 22.5-degree segments. I set a camera on a tripod in front of the lazy susan, took photos at each 22.5-degree rotation, then used Microsoft Research’s Image Composite Editor to stitch them together. There went another few days….
180-degrees of the branch in 8 photos, stitched togetherDimensional lumber, blue stain on the upper right
I tried several different apps for morphing one image into the other but wasn’t satisfied with the image quality of any of the video morphing ones. I finally used the animation plug in for GIMP. But I had to figure out the proportions in pixels to have the correct transitions from one texture to the other, as well as how to fade one image into the other, since I didn’t want a harsh line between them.
My thumbnail drawings and pixel calculations
And of course, with 20 layers, the file was huge and gave me all sorts of computer fits and starts. I finally got it to work, painfully exporting the image graphic for each page, front and back–66 in all.
Then I remembered the spreads needed to face each other, i.e. the image on the left-facing page would be flipped horizontally with respect to the right-facing page. However I could do this in page layout software… There goes a week.
I sent a PDF file to my partner’s 11 x17 office laser printer, with two of my book pages on an 11 x 17 sheet, but the prints weren’t as vivid and sharp as I had hoped. It turned out my own printer with high quality paper was better. So I re-laid it out on legal size paper, which is the largest I can print in my studio. Then I realized if I was going to use a laser print transfer method, I’d have to flip all the pages back the other way, since the print needed to go toner-side down onto the wood pages.
I also decided I wanted to include the text quoted at the beginning, so that meant going back into each image file of all the pages to add the text. And that the text would have to be reversed. There goes another week…
OK, then the process becomes even more laborious. I coated both sides of each wooden page with acrylic gloss medium—two coats, a dry thicker one and a half-water, thinner coat to even out any rugosities. That’s 80 coats in all. Then I do the same thing with all the prints, 80 more. Then I use the same gloss medium to glue them together. I only made one sequence mistake, but it’s not very obvious, so I can live with it.
And speaking of tedious, after the prints-glued-to-wooden-pages dry for 24 hours under weights, the next step is to dissolve the paper off the back of the print. In my experience this usually takes at least three passes. In the first pass I run a sponge over the back of the paper and let it sit for a moment. Then with rough-fingered gardening gloves on, I begin rubbing the paper off. (I have learned to wear gloves, because I have previously rubbed the fingerprints off my fingers, making it difficult to log into my phone!). Once it dries, it’s easy to see how much paper is left to dissolve, and the second pass gets most of it off. But there is always still another bit of white fog after they dry, meaning there is still more paper to dissolve. And you have to be careful – if you rub too hard, you will tear or pull off the thin film of toner embedded in acrylic medium.
Trimming any excess film off is also nerve-wracking, because you don’t want to nick the wood and have light spots interfere with the handsome laser-cut edges. This proved to be quite difficult to do on my interior interpolated holes.
Then I coated each page with wax medium and let it dry. This acts as a sealing varnish that, unlike most other varnishes, won’t stick to itself since the book is usually stored closed. All in all, the coating, transfer, and varnishing phase takes another week.
Finally, it’s time to bind the pages. I had included those 1 mm holes in the laser-cutting. Why did I include so many?!? Why did I make them so small!?!? In the binding method I used, modified Coptic, each station or hole requires its own needle. I didn’t have 36 needles that would fit into the holes with an eye large enough to accommodate my hand-dyed, 3-ply Kevlar thread. I had about 20 needles the right size and tried dipping the ends of the rest of the threads into glue to stiffen them, so they could act like shoelace aglets, but it was too slow and frustrating to get through the holes and wrap back around the stitches without needles. So several trips two different stores to acquire the right size needles.
At last I began binding, back to front. But not only did it take a long time to go over/in/out/wrap-around-the-stich and pull-through each of 36 stations, but when I coated each page with multiple layers of gloss medium, all the little sewing holes had become stopped up with acrylic. I had to take a nail and pound out each hole before I could sew the page.
Worse, by the time I got to the middle of the book and measured my remaining thread, I knew I hadn’t calculated the length of thread required correctly. My fall-back strategy was to begin binding front to back with new thread to meet and interlace in the middle. And of course I had to dye, dry and separate more thread. Two more weeks. And then…
Finally done!
Bark Beetle Book Vol. XXXIV: Resource CompetitionRear viewHalf way through the book the beetles have taken over.Near the end of the book, the manufactured wood is ahead.
My respected colleague Iskra Johnson recently posed a question in her blog, “Who Is Your Muse?” in which she tags her mother as an ongoing source of inspiration.
I found myself thinking of my inspiration as coming from multiple gods rather than a single muse—that is, each work in a series builds on the previous one. When I worked with a team of program managers and software developers, at the end of every project we held a post mortem in hopes of gaining even better results on the next project. While every project had different parameters — context, deadline, team members, audience and so on — one finding was always the same: “I wish we had/allowed/planned for more time at the end so we could make more than only “must-do” fixes. We didn’t know we’d have these better ideas until we saw the first (alpha), second (beta), third (final or release) version…”
The practice of iteration is sorely underrated. Defining imagination as an ability to envision that which doesn’t yet exist, most people — even artists — have less imagination than they think do. But the great thing about the self-directed practice of fine art is that you can keep iterating, if you acknowledge it as your muse
Seeing how the last creation came out is often the prompt for the next idea…
Sometimes those ideas never seem to stop! Below you see my third artist book made from bark-beetle damaged wood and my twenty-fifth…. This video explains some of my inspiration, process and collaborations.
Bark Beetle Book Vol. III: Bug Ruts. Pine-beetle-bored bark in epoxy resin, laser-cut iron-oxide dyed felt pages, wire-edge bound with wooden “worry” beads. 9.25″L x 5″W x 2.5″H plus strings
Bark Beetle Book Vol. XXV: What the Beetles Wrote. Wood with mountain pine beetle galleries, hand-made paper-cast from mountain pine beetle and other beetle galleries; iron-oxide dyed non-woven viscose book cloth. 11″H x 9.5″W x 7.5″D
Some people may already know that I have a not-so-secret life as a book artist, as well as a painter. One body of my work as a painter is large portraits of individual burned trees. (See the Burnscape section of my website.) Spending recreational time in the wilderness all over the American West has brought me in close contact with large burned-over areas. I also began to notice the number of dead trees in forests that otherwise seemed fine. I saw what seemed like writing or hieroglyphics on the inner bark of dying trees.
It turns out there are thousands of species of bark beetles, most of which are happily decomposing already-dead wood. But a few species that attack living trees en masse have become epidemic thanks to climate change: warmer winters don’t kill off the larvae and warmer, longer summers allow them more reproduction cycles. And drought- or heat-stressed trees are more vulnerable. Working with two entomologists and a forester, I’ve created a series of artist books on the topic.
Bark Beetle Book Vol. XIV Ars datum est
16.5”H x 4.5” diam.
Log with fir-engraver galleries*, laser-cut and engraved mat board pages,
laser-transfers, paint, linen thread
For example, Volume XIV, Ars datum est above, is made from an actual Eastern Washington log, with laser-cut pages bound into its center. Each page is essentially a bar from a bar chart representing areas of British Columbia and Alberta affected by mountain pine beetle from 1999-2007 – so the book is art and data, too.
My most recent bark beetle book was definitely the most technically ambitious one I’ve tried yet, and I learned quite a bit in the process.
Bark Beetle Book Vol. XVIII
27” x 3.5” diam.
Maple branch covers, laser-cut and engraved bamboo pages, tea-dyed wool felt, linen thread
I collected a branch with many beetle galleries on it, interesting to me because, with rot, the larval galleries were dark-on-light instead of the more typical light-on-dark. It suggests intra-tree spread: the number of engraved galleries* on the pages increases from bottom to top as you page through the book.
The branch was somewhat curved and also twisted along the axis of its split. I thought the best way to create pages for such a irregular, non-rectangular shape might be to obtain a 3D model of each half, create the solid between them and then slice it in software. Unable to find a local service bureau for 3D scanning, a mechanical engineering friend created a seat-of-the-pants XYZ data capture system composed of 2 rulers, a radial arm saw and digital calipers.
It took me an entire day to take (4) XYZ measurements at 1-centimeter intervals along one half of the branch. And I now realize this is just too coarse, I missed some key features in the shape.
After a lot of work trying to understand how to import an XYZ data cloud Fusion360, we eventually succeeded in making the data points operable, creating the solid volume between to the 2 branch half models, adding binding holes and slicing it. I also traced the actual ragged fore-edge, imported that line and created a second solid to chomp into fore-edge of the book page solid, so that it would have some of the nicks and craters of the beetle galleries where they cross the edges from front edge to back edge. Slicer, a Fusion360 app, at least made the slicing easy and generated flat cutting patterns. Then I traced some of the beetle galleries onto the cutting patterns for engraving.
Binding the book was equally challenging because:
not all the page pieces met along the spine edge,
some were too small to put binding holes in,
and despite choosing the straightest edge as the binding side, there was enough of a curve that even with elastic thread I couldn’t bind across that big a gap.
So it’s “differentially” bound; that is, sewn where spine-side page edges met best. Some of the tiny and/or non-spine side slices were glued to the branch wood before binding. I used pieces of tea-dyed felt as end-papers to soften the stair-stepped edges of the glued-in pieces and to hide the ends of the binding threads.
About 9 weeks…. Phew!
Many, many thanks to Jon Cluts and Rafael Machado de Lima Silva at UW Bothell’s Maker Space; Tom Stone, who made the data capture system and helped me work out how to get the data usable in Fusion360; also to Per Steenstrup and his brother on the latter task; to the support folks at ponoko who helped troubleshoot my cutting/engraving files. And Steve, who likes to be away from home so he can’t hear the cursing when I can’t get something to work : – )
*Galleries is the term most often used to describe the complex patterns that the larvae chew between the bark and the sap wood. I’ve also seen them called larval mines.
Once again, the car is packed and ready to drive 1000 miles.
In August-September I was among the fortunate recipients of a spot at the Jentel Foundation’s artist residency in north central Wyoming. There is always something that surprises me in every residency I attend – the pleasure of writers reading works-in-progress at Vermont Studio Center; extraordinary modern classical music at The Banff Centre, and so on. Here, I didn’t expect to find pockets of the British Empire among the sage hills of the Big Horn Mountains. In the 19th century a number of English second/third/fourth sons left the mother country and bought cattle ranches. The Big Horn polo club was established in 1898. One local family married back into the Queen’s retinue, so on her 1984 visit, she stopped in Sheridan, community of ~17,000 in north central Wyoming.
My other discovery was the banded-gneiss hard-rock core of the Big Horn Mountains. It’s 3 billion years old – two-thirds the age of the planet – and a billion years older than the Vishnu schists at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The cirques near the divide offer massive faces. Besides rock glacier obstacles to easy hiking (in some cases I made less than a mile an hour), its high elevation (for West-Coaster used to sea-level), this age alone seems worthy of respect.
Second Lost Twin Lake (watercolor on paper, 15″x 11″)
My four fellow visual artists and two writers were good company when I wasn’t off working or walking. The studio spaces are large and cool – important when you’re there in the hot summer months; in our case we also endured many days of thick smoke from Montana and Canada wildfires. I pursued my usual strategy of hiking a day, drawing and painting on location, then “resting” by painting or book-binding all day.
In my Jentel studio (Steve Price photo)
I worked very hard on a beetle book inspired by beautiful slabs of Alaska yellow cedar bored by Buprestid beetles. But after the 80 hours or so it took to finish my interior pages – I just didn’t think they were commensurate with the beauty of the wood. After creating the files to get mat board laser-cut, tracing the beetle galleries I’d seen in the 1988 Lost Fire area of the Big Horns, tea-dying 22 pieces of fragile antique rice paper (with a pattern that looks a bit like wood grain), applying Scotch 568 adhesive, gluing the rice paper to the mat board and dissolving the adhesive in the gallery areas, using a wood-burning tool to outline the galleries… It was very depressing. It took several weeks before I could face scraping off the rice paper and starting over.
Bark beetle book Volume XIII, page binding in progress. Maybe Thirteen is jinxed?
In the meantime, because I was in Wyoming surrounded by cowboy culture, and because I’d visited Kings Saddlery on our weekly forays into Sheridan, it occurred to me to try making the pages out of debossed leather. As usual in my book projects, this required learning about processes and skills entirely new to me, and multiple tests of methods.
Front cover, Buprestid Kanakata (Cedar, leather, linen thread; 9″ x 7″ x 4″)
Bottom edge
Last page
All this effort reminds me that the more I follow the many paths my obsessions take me, the closer I think artwork is to science and engineering. I wish all these years I’d been keeping a lab book – preferably searchable – of all the tests of materials and methods I’ve made. It would be easier than pawing through my boxes and boxes of samples with barely readable notes scratched on them.
I was listening to a Digital Fabrication Residency talk by Laura Splan about her biologically-inspired bodies of work incorporating digital technologies such as machine embroidery, laser cutting, 3D-printing etc. She used the word tenacity to describe that state of exciting and anxious exploration of what the tools can do on a deadline. “Failure isn’t an option but it’s also an expectation.” This statement gongs through my head as I tediously adjust my 52 Inkscape vector drawings for probably twentieth time. She also says to pace yourself, know at what point you have to accept what you can accomplish and when you have make compromises with your original vision. Not bad advice in any endeavor ; – )
Here are some interim points along my own project path. The vision is two artist books, Siamese-twinned at the spines, one small (5″ x 12″) and one large (16″ x 12″). The pages and covers will eventually cut from clear acrylic, though right now I am working with a test run on cardboard. LED lights in the conjoined spine will fluoresce light out to the edges of the acrylic sheets. The object(s) will either sit on a table as separate books or be wall-mounted vertically together.
The vision has taken me into some familiar territory: using vector software to interpolate one shape to another over a series of steps so that the “slices” or “pages” describe an overall volume. (I enjoy the multiple meanings of “volume” –dimensional form and particular book.) Those shapes are then laser cut.
Laser-cut cardboard dummy of the smaller book.
Laser-cut cardboard dummy of the larger book.
Here I’m testing my binding method on a cardboard dummy of the small book’s shaped pages.
But some of the skills are outside my comfort zone. I’ve learned not only to design and animate, but also program the firmware on my BlinkyTape strip of 60 LEDs. I had some help soldering on an additional 60 LEDs (thanks Mark!). After traveling down many dead-ends it was a moment of great triumph when they all lit up in the pattern I had created. (Thanks, Maarten and Mets!)
This image shows two strips of LEDs soldered together and running a subtle animation of blue-to-green-to-lighter blue and back again.
I have created the design for a cast acrylic part to hold the LEDs in the spine in Fusion360 but don’t dare get it printed or milled until the book is bound and I know its exact measurements. (Thanks, Erik and Kari!)
A recent rendering of the custom part for holding the LEDs and butting the pages up them.
It feels as if the project will never get finished. So many pieces to fit together, so much time spent learning. One step forward for every two steps back… And what if it isn’t cool?!? Not only does it take tenacity and persistence, but faith that the end result will be worth seeing.
Usually I blog when I head out on the road, but I wanted to share a stationary experience. I’m in the midst of an online residency — we have fuze lectures and conference calls, do tutorials, work up files for samples and, hopefully, create a finished project in a four-week period. The theme is digital fabrication: software-driven laser-cutting, 3D printing, CNC milling and routing, textile printing, digital embroidery and so forth, offered by Digital Fabrication Residency of Easton, Maryland. (Of course, being online, location is irrelevant.) Kari and Erik are incredibly knowledgeable and generous with their time and learning.
It’s an opportunity for me to unite my dormant inner geek with my artistic practice. While I still think of myself primarily as a painter, artist books have become another important medium. They offer dimension, intimacy, proceed through time, carry a lot of cultural baggage, and can exist somewhere other than on a wall.
I had already been exploring laser cutting as a means to make rigid pages for my rockbound books, such as Snowline and Canyon:
Rockbound Book: Snowline. Sliced snowflake obsidian covers, stiff leaf bound with viscose fabric to laser-cut mat board pages; CNC-routed wooden case.
Rockbound Book: Canyon. Sliced chert stiff-leaf-bound to laser-cut matboard pages with viscose fabric. CNC-routed wooden case.
Now I am learning to visualize and execute an additional variety of processes.
The books have been evolving. They began with re-use of original paintings through reproductions. Somewhere in the first ten or so, I realized that matching the book’s form and materials to the painted subject matter was at least as exciting as the paintings-as-pages. More recent examples these books not only don’t need text, they don’t even need images. The form and the materials *are* the narrative!
Elephant Canyon Volume. Sandstone covers, laser-cut mat board pages, strung on elastic cords. The book “opens” by pulling up the top cover.
The residency is helping me see that a subtext (so to speak) of my preoccupation with the natural world is melding machine techniques with organic forms and materials. To me, if there’s no sense of nature, the artist’s hand, or an inviting surface in the end result I’ve failed. So I’m thrilled on many levels with this residency, and it follows a common artistic development:
learning new techniques…
doing the old stuff in new ways…
uncovering latent themes…
generating new ideas, seeing new ways to do new things.
I’ll be excited to share images of the results when they’re finished.
suzeart 