I've just finished an altered book. This one started as a British book about important events in the 20th century, published in the 1970s. Only a little of the book's content survives now, though. I chose the book in a thrift shop in Santa Fe (NM) because I liked the quality of the paper, and it has a sewn binding. It's a nice big book - about 12 inches tall when closed.
I had a couple of compositional themes with this book. First, there are large, mostly original drawings that often float off the left or right edge of a page spread. Second, I used portions of printmaking plates, cut up and glued in as collage elements. The plates are from monotypes, and I worked them on vellum. The original printing medium was water based. I liked how the translucency of the vellum allowed the plate portions to nestle down into the matrix of the gouache mixtures I had already applied to the paper.
The imagery is - various. Plants and animals, sometimes in microscopic views, my clay vessels and sculpture, landscape photos - and a few other things. Snakes are notable - I used my stash of photos of snakes from a teapot project I did several years ago for the Year of the Snake. As usual in my two-dimensional work, objects are presented in kind of a primordial soup of contexts.
I had a couple of compositional themes with this book. First, there are large, mostly original drawings that often float off the left or right edge of a page spread. Second, I used portions of printmaking plates, cut up and glued in as collage elements. The plates are from monotypes, and I worked them on vellum. The original printing medium was water based. I liked how the translucency of the vellum allowed the plate portions to nestle down into the matrix of the gouache mixtures I had already applied to the paper.
The imagery is - various. Plants and animals, sometimes in microscopic views, my clay vessels and sculpture, landscape photos - and a few other things. Snakes are notable - I used my stash of photos of snakes from a teapot project I did several years ago for the Year of the Snake. As usual in my two-dimensional work, objects are presented in kind of a primordial soup of contexts.
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