Baltimore Sonnets

This year I talked more about my art than I've talked in sixteen years.  What a journey!  I am thankful to all the scientists and researchers who allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and experiment with new ideas! I am especially thankful to Dr. Laura Sinnott who first commissioned me, when she was a PhD candidate, to do the visual component of her interactive music work on Franz Schubert's 1827 Winterreise song cycle.  Today, Laura informed me that one of the artworks, pictured in these two photographs, was missing after a move.  Yes, this was a year of highs and "not too highs." Wishing all a very happy and blessed 2019!

I love books!  I love reading them.  I love touching them.  I love the sound of turning pages.  I love the smell of cotton fiber pages. For thousands of years, prior to Guttenberg's invention of moveable type in Germany during the mid 1400's, each and every book was made by hand.  Books were expensive, highly coveted  possessions of the wealthy, royalty, aristocracy, and monasteries.   If you were somebody, you owned a beautiful, well crafted book. Maintaining the high quality traditions of handmade books of the past is important to me.  In recent years, I 've replaced handmade paper with handwoven and luxury textiles.  These textiles are innately tactile and relatable: Fabric pages are not flat and completely blank. Each stitch adds texture, memory and dimension.  The fabric moves and molds itself in the hands of the reader. Even people who never or rarely work with textile will recognize the textures of fabric from thei...

For years I've been asked, "Is Book Arts art?" or "I've never heard of Book Arts, what is it?"  Recently, I've been asked to define Book Arts and classify it among other art forms.  Researching the history of artists' books, I found a wide range of definitions.  None sufficiently described what I've been doing. Therefore, to better explain the types of books I create, I needed to delve deeper into the concept, idea, structure, and language of Book Arts. The next few blog posts will be dedicated to how I define Book Arts as a book artist. Well, first of all, I am using Book Arts as a singular "uncountable noun."   Uncountable (also non-count) nouns are used to describe a quality, concept, action, or substance that cannot be divided into separate elements.   Non-Count nouns also refer to a whole category made up of different varieties or a whole group of things that is made of many individual parts. I have always t...