Barn Burning 2: The Burnaning

    I have a few larger independent projects going on this semester. This is great, as am I am learning how to balance the workload for these along with the smaller stuff that is due week by week. I'm also way more invested in my work. It feels like a culmination of everything I've been working toward for the last couple of years.
       The most gargantuan of these is an artist's book of William Faulkner's short story Barn Burning. This story has been on my radar since 2007 when I read it for a modernist literature class. I'd already read a bunch of Faulkner's work, but this story stood out as it takes the themes of class in a postbellum and post industrial revolution south and explores them fully in a condensed fashion completely from the point of view of a seven year old boy in a sharecropper family. The father is a terrorist who, when he feels wronged by the landowners, will set fire to their barns. The boy is torn between the loyalty he feels to his father and the unhappiness he feels from being despised by the general population and from being constantly and violently uprooted. Though they are more in the background, there are also themes of race and gender which I am trying to explore more through imagery.
       So where does one start with 22 pages of text? Well, last fall I made an experimental mock up of this book for my advanced drawing class. Initially, it was going to be a one off, but as I grew more engrossed in the text and the way I made images for it as well as the book making process itself, I realized that this was just the beginning. This was a great project because I was able to experiment with using old photographs and chemicals and leafing in my drawing process. Most of all, it was fun. Often, drafting is the most painful part of the image making process for me, and this book was not about drafting images. It was about printmaking and layering and taking away and layering again and making my studio smell like wintergreen solution and bleach.

Barn Burning Mock Up, 2011

       This is what I began with this semester.  My goal with the next version was to incorporate the text into the imagery, create drawings to go along with the prints that I was doing, as well as create visual flow through the story.  I will be updating more soon with how the process is going.  I've been learning a lot, like that books have a lot of components and that they take a huge amount of planning.  Also to remember to scan the pages before I bind the book.