Day 1

Welcome to my blog.  Who am I?  Just an artist friend.  I’ve just returned from 5 days with artist friends in Sturgeon Bay, sharing, learning, renewing the spirit…becoming inspired once again.  Encouraged to create a blog, Ruthe showed me the way.

If this blog meanders it’s because that’s the way my mind works…I’m navigating through ideas, media, and techniques, and will write about them as they come up and are used.  This past week is my starting point.  Other experiences, both past and in future will be included as they come to mind.

The 4 of us decided that each would create an altered book rather than work in our usual media, as each of us works differently.  What we each do individually did feed the project and we all brought and shared materials.

Day 1 we wandered through the antique mall to find the ‘right’ book to alter.  My selection was a hardbound book 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ and about 3/4″ thick, a textbook on “Piloting and Navigating”.  Seemed perfect to me.

I said this was going to be a log of ideas and techniques rather than a focused art piece.  Perhaps because I wasn’t attempting to make a “masterpiece” so to speak, the book began to take on a definite look, feel and direction….with the title contributing to the concept.

We experimented with making doors, windows and pockets of the pages.  We created papers to use in collage, did rubbings (see techniques,page 1) and photo transfers ), painted and collaged pages.  The cover of Ruthe’s book was done in encaustic, beautiful.

I started by cutting a small window in the cover into which objects would be placed and set in epoxy later.  Then I covered the book in a crumpled paper I had made a couple of years ago to be used in collages.  Many of the diagrams and figures in the book were torn out, the edges treated with black ink on the edges and put into the pockets.  Using the photo transfer technique, I placed a ship navigating across one of the charts.  Several rubbings filled other pages.  What pleased me most was the desire to cover some pages, especially the written words, by drawing a continuous squiggly black line…looks much like stipling in quilting…to me this represented ‘navigating’, and is probably the most obsessive thing I’ve done in making art.  Virtually every page finished so far has at least some of this stipling line.  I love it.  The book is a work in progress.