BOOK ART
Artist’s Book
An ‘Artist’s Book’ is a hand-made book or ‘book-like’ structure that houses a sequence of words or images, or some combination of both. The very stability of this traditional form invites a challenge to reinterpret it for purely artistic and conceptual effects.
It is a compelling medium that suggests an open forum for new ideas and collaborative ways of thinking. Some of the books shown here are unique and some are editioned.
Wood Notes Wild
1996, Folios 18”x24”, 40 pages, calligraphy over painted surfaces of wheat paste and acrylic, glass, board and cloth cover
Wood Notes Wild is a hand lettered, painted and bound one-of-a kind manuscript. The work celebrates the tension between nature’s unruly cacophony of bird song and a 19th century bird lover’s ecstatic commitment to lash that sound to a system of notes and measures. The manuscript is based on an 1892 published edition of Wood Notes Wild: Notations of Bird Music by Simeon Pease Cheney. After a distinguished career as a singing teacher in rural Vermont and a composer of popular music, Cheney devoted himself in his final years to listening to birdsong and transcribing it into musical notation. These musical passages were accompanied by his observations on the birds and their music.
Purchased by the Rochester Institute of Technology, for inclusion in the Melbert B. Cary Collection, showcasing the Graphic Arts (fine printing, calligraphy, bookbinding and illustration). Exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery DC, National Museum of Women in the Arts DC, Pyramid Atlantic MD (“Curator’s Choice” award), McGuffey Art Center VA