This is a new altered book I'm making.  I've glued all of the pages and painted a background on them.  Now I've started on the first page spread with collaged elements.  This page is probably complete except for a label identifying the book.

A running background theme in this book is Covid-19, the coronavirus that is wrecking human interaction - and life itself - around the world.  I have downloaded some of the coronavirus graphics we're all familiar with by now - I've altered them and printed them on vellum (a translucent paper), and I'm cutting out portions of the images to collage into the book.  On this first page spread, you can see a virus on the right hand page near the center fold, either floating or possibly attaching itself to the image below it.  Is it just another virus hanging out somewhere, hopefully not doing much, or is it attacking some kind of human organ system?  I think you know the answer already, having lived this far.

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've just finished another altered book/sketchbook.  I use these to experiment and think about ideas.  This one is really a souped-up sketchbook.  To make it, I started with a commercially available cork-bound sketchbook that had acid free pages and a sewn binding.  I used watercolor to make colored patterns on the pages, and then I tipped in charcoal drawings I had made of various things - mostly plant parts.

Crinoid Ropes, mixed media painting with collage elements, on board, 14 x 11 inches

Click the link for more paintings in the series.

I've been exploring imagery for the painted portion of an installation I'm building - the installation will go to the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery in March.

Budding Plant with Lion-Dog Guardian, 10 x 8 inches, mixed media

Click the image to see more paintings from this series.