Recently I found Book + Art: Handcrafting Artists' Books, by Dorothy Simpson Krause, on the shelf at Borders and had to get it. It is beautiful, lovely, and filled with inspiration. I read it at a time that I was wondering exactly what I thought I was doing, and this helped everything to coalesce in my mind. I love books, I have always loved books, and nearly everything I have learned over the last three years is all useful in creating books. I am still going to do other things, because I don't think I'm made such that I could do only one thing, but I can embrace the idea of being a book artist.
I really liked Stepan's blog posts about their trip to the Czech Republic this summer, and along with his pictures I think they would make a beautiful book--and a great Xmas present. Been thinking about how to do it. Would love the images and words to overlap. Wouldn't it be neat to do it on glass pages, and use the nifty Keith Smith Coptic sewing to attach? I think that's beyond my abilities to execute for this Xmas though, with everything else I have to do. Maybe I could print the pictures onto canvas, or do image transfers onto Claudine's sticky back canvas (reverse before printing), and then have the text on paper? Could I use plexiglass pages instead of glass? More durable is better. Then I could put images and text on and have it all look like it's floating. Would it be too hard to read, and would that matter? Or could put the text on a translucent paper, like onionskin or vellum, and have the images printed on transparencies. Ooh, that sounds like it has possibilities. Will keep ruminating on the matter.
One of my biggest challenges is to take my art to a personal level. I still have a very large barrier between me and what I make, and I think if I can surmount that, what I make will have more power. That is going to require me to slow down my thinking a bit and also focus it more. There are just so many things I want to try! And the quote by Lily Tomlin quote about her teenage diaries that I read on Dorinda Fox's blog recently does express one of my biggest fears, I'm sorry to admit. ("What if it's boring . . . or if it's not boring, it might be too revealing, or worse, it might be too revealing and still be boring.")
