In Memorium

Here are some pictures of Badlands National Park from the trip my parents and I took early June across the country in honor of the closing of our national parks for the last couple of weeks. Fingers crossed that things really are getting resolved!

Battery Kinzie

In a continuation of my efforts to making making books complicated and expensive, I spent the semester creating sketches, aquatinting plates, and doing layers and layers of printing in inks of differing colors and opacities.  Things learned: gamsol is an is the sort of smell that can really seep into your clothing, and washi is super resilient.  This was a wonderful project to learn on, and something I will certainly continue to experiment with now that I have nine huge copper plates that need to make their cost back.

The sketches and images are based on Battery Kinzie, a portion of Fort Wordon State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, which was once part of the Triangle of Fire along with two other forts around Puget Sound.  Nothing came to call from the frozen north, so these forts never saw battle.  Now they are overgrown and settled in the mud.  Fort Wordon State Park is one of my very favorite places on earth because it has a great mix of creepy, dank, concrete architecture and stunning ocean mountain views.

It's Japanese stab stitch, and I dip dyed the book cloth, which is made from Irish linen.  As you can see in the last photo, the idea of the long spreads was to mimic what Asian binding often does, which is have thin folded sheets, while not binding the second half of the fold in so the images can be viewed long way as well as regular pages.  It is aquatinted on Kitakata mitsumata paper.    

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.  

Summertime

        Her mother washed her clothes in the old washer, which spat soap out of a long black tube and rumbled violently on the concrete. After she trudged outside with a pile of moist fabric in one of those five-dollar plastic baskets. Two gnarled poles jutted into the sky. They were connected by shoelaces knotted to shoelaces. Once the shoelaces had been pristine and white in crisp paper on crisp shoes with fresh rubber soles and a fresh leather smell. Now they frayed into their knots and swayed dully in the wind. Clothespins interrupted their drab horizon. Cotton and linen and poly blends hung and swung to and fro with the horizon and the breeze whispered through the holes in the weaves until the damp was blown away and what remained was dry and wrinkled. Clothes dried by the wind are permeated by it. They are duller no matter the detergent you use. 

        Today after her mother took her school uniform that she had dropped ketchup and mustard onto from a lunch full of condiment overestimations. She ventured outdoors in underwear alone and saw the pleated plaid skirt and sweater vest fluttering and dancing. She ran over in bare feet and briefs and stuck her nose into the damp. The cool must filled her and her little heart beat faster and she suddenly wanted it to rain. She gasped at a low rumble of thunder and felt wet on her cheek. The clothes grew heavy and slumped to the grass below. Her briefs clung to her body and she tugged them down her skinny legs. Her limbs slipped in the mud and drew her into a recently seeded field. There was no growth so she was flung into it. She kicked and splashed and squished. The thunder roared a giant lion roar and the rain fell harder and she felt she was so wet that she would never be dry again. 

        It wasn’t ever going to stop raining because Day-oos was angry and she was going to drown but what better way to go? She saw it clearly. Her little body floating upside down in a vast green sea. It was too late to make a raft, too late to apologize or pray. But she was naked as the day she was born and was slippery with Day-oos’ wet earth. 

This is the beginning of my final comic for my comics class this last semester based on a short piece of writing I've had floating around for a couple of years. Below is the corresponding writing. To churn out a lot of drawings fairly quickly, I worked with drybrush india ink on larger pieces of cold press watercolor paper. When it was working for me, I really enjoyed it, and it's a style that I want to explore more and feel that I'm just discovering.