How Things Have Changed

Who doesn't love a peony? Deborah Barlow describes it as the sine qua non of flowers and Karen Fitzgerald says that they grace a space like nothing else. This is the romantic Bunker Hill, a fickle bloomer but inspiring to consider.

Festiva Maximas and Dinner Plates are hogging the space around my red peony. It might be more productive in a space of its own. I'll move it come Fall, but in the meantime, it lives in a haiku by Buson and as part of an exhibition from 2009 that's morphing into a book.

As 2021 began, I found myself needing to make things with my hands, which led me to books and prints. Perhaps touch has become more important than ever, maybe we are a little tired of screens. Yet it has been through screens that I've learned a great deal about making books, about the book arts, and about connecting with individuals and groups of whom I would have known nothing - if not for screens.

It's strange to me that I haven't been moved to get my hands into that most viscous of all materials, oil paint, but I think the reason lies in how a painting gets made. When I paint, I am like a spider spinning a thread of filaments from multiple unseen spigots somewhere deep in my gut. The thread has no solid form until it is extruded. In other words, painting is less about the work of the hand, and more about the transformative power of the imagination. A painter's vision is held in the inner body.

On the other hand, a book is the accumulation of a gathering of external materials, Saint Lucy holding her plate of eyes. A stack of drawings, held, touched, observed, dictates not only the future book's form but also the kinds of materials I will use. Its colors, its size or format, the case that houses it, and even the book's prospectus that will announce its presence to the world -- all these are tangible and determined by the facts of the drawings.