Blogorrhea Junior

Up Close and Personal with Paper

I love it when two of my passions come together. I've been a science geek forever, much longer than I've been in love with making books, and photomicrographs (pictures taken through microscopes at various magnifications) have always brought out the same wonder in me that the night sky does. Along with the dozens of book and paper arts sites I peruse daily, I keep an eye on several science sites as well, including the National Geographic News, where I found this gem: a photomicrograph of Japanese paper, by Charles Kazilek of Arizona State, one of the ten best microscope photographs chosen by Nikon this year.

Kazilek studies "both the art and science of fine papermaking" and also teaches a class in scientific data presentation. (Nice to know I'm not the only geek with those overlapping interests.) What makes this so interesting to me is the apparently chaotic organization of the paper fibers. This is Sugikawa (cedar bark) & Tenjyo paper, and you can see here the lack of "grain" that characterizes handmade paper. Machine-made paper has a far more orderly fiber structure, which allows it to be torn easily along that grain. This is what gives Japanese paper its strength, even when it's tissue-fine: there's no grain for a tear to follow, and no inherent weakness. The stronger those fibers are in themselves, the stronger a chaotic web of them will be. To give you an idea of how densely woven these fibers are, this is a 100x image of an area no larger than a period.

By the way, these aren't the actual colors of the paper itself. The photo was taken with a scanning laser confocal  microscope, which makes certain materials fluoresce in colors not their own. The scanning part means that, like an MRI, it can produce 3D images of whatever it's looking at, even if that object, like paper, appears two dimensional.*

Nikon chose another of Kazilek's paper micrographs as an image of distinction in 2007, this one of kozo/mulberry paper. Both of these images are from The Paper Project, which also has a lovely gallery.

*If you'd like a more sciency version of this post that talks about hydrogen bonding and electron microscopes, check out my new post on Cocktail Party Physics.

More Abcedarian Pop-Up Madness

Finally got hold of my own copy of Marion Bataille's ABC3D, which I totally adore and thumbed through over and over again, chortling with delight. Then, being the addict I am, I went hunting for other pop-ups and other abcedarian fare, and stumbled across this gem. It took me once through to actually see what it was, but just as semi-random shapes, it's a a beautiful book, and a whole lotta work, too. On top of that, the soundtrack is an absolute hoot. Enjoy!

Demolition Day

Flux Factory, the excellent art collective in Queens, is not going gently into that good night when the MTA comes to call. Slated for demolition to make way for the East Side Access project, they're holding one last blow out, The End of the End of the End of the End, before they move on to a more peripatetic lifestyle. Join the fun on October 30th & 31st for a mad windup to Halloween, with a potluck and performances:

$10
october 30-31st
potluck 6:00pm
party 8:00pm-4:00am
cleanup 4:00am-6:00am

"Journaling"

I've been watching the "journaliing"* movement for a while now, from its early days as a strictly literary pursuit to its recent developments in visual or artist's journaling, and doing so with both amusement and bewilderment (would that be bemusement?). I'm a lifelong keeper of journals in their written form, and I enjoy reading other people's published journals. Journals often present us at our most unguarded, the most true to ourselves (although professional writers are almost always conscious of writing for an audience, even in their diaries). Reading Virginia Woolf's published diaries was one of the most fascinating and enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years. They offer, to my mind, just the right mixture of snark, gossip, history, personal observation, and craft.

I've kept my own paper journals since about 7th grade, with a long dry stretch when I first moved to New York, and eventually turned to blogging as a natural extension of that. I've taught my students to keep journals in classes, and finally, last summer, taught a class in "journaling." (If you want to see my syllabus, you can download it here.)  Mine was a literary pursuit, though I encouraged my students to do whatever they wanted in their journals, without restriction or fear of penalty. For many of them, it was the first time they'd tried writing in a journal; many of them were really loathe to part with them by the end of the semester, not because they didn't want me to read them, but because they didn't want to stop.

I've always seen journals as a path to the interior life, a tool for self-reflection and self-examination, though people keep written journals for many different reasons. I'm a verbal person, comfortable with words as tools and as "art supplies," so visual journaliing does not come naturally to me, but I think it's vastly intriguing. I also think it can serve the same purposes written journals do, as well as serve as an outlet for creativity. On top of that, it appeals to the book artist in me.

But journals, those that survive, are also historical documents. Journals like these are useful not just for historical research but for scientific research as well, as evidence of climate change, for instance. I've read a number of historical journals, including one of the most famous, Samuel Pepys diary, and I'm always fascinated by the window on that particular world they provide. There is a common humanity in them, the same concerns we all share (food, clothing, shelter, love, security, peace, our children, our marriages) but the underlying assumptions of life are often quite different from contemporary ones. We worry about our 401(k)s for retirement; our historical counterparts were often far more worried about their immortal souls after death. Journals can tell you a great deal not just about the individual who kept it, but about the society of which they were a part.

It's this last aspect I was thinking about when I looked at Teesha Moore's visual journal pages. These are beautiful, strange, wondrous pages, full of pop culture references and images as well as vintage and original work. Say some historian digs one of these up in a musty attic 300 years from now. what is this, for instance, going to say about 21st Century Post-Modern American life?

I'm a little afraid to guess. But I think Teesha Moore will be having a good giggle somewhere, watching that historian try to figure it out.

[h/t to Paper Studio]

*As a side note, can I just say how much I hate the verb form of this noun? I understand the need for it, because "keeping a journal" or "writing a journal" is way too many syllables. It's just an ugly word. Blech.

Women Artists, Male Curators, Artists and Art Lovers: Go See This Movie Now

"Who Does She Think She Is?"

She's a woman, and an artist, and a mother. Why is this still an issue? Why is anything about whatever women do besides marry men and raise babies an issue? If you're a woman and you do some kind of art, whether you choose to marry and/or raise kids (and it's all about choice, isn't it?) should not be anybody's business but your own. It shouldn't make you a bad mother or a less serious artist any way you do it.

And yet, it does, as this dumb-ass review of the movie from Time Out NY indicates:

This documentary encapsulates everything that gives feminism a bad name, from whining about patriarchal society to celebrating the goddess within. . . .  Pamela Tanner Boll’s thesis—it’s hard to be both mother and artist—neglects to mention that it’s tricky for anyone to make a living as an artist.

Missing the point anyone? Of course it's hard to make a living as an artist, but it's a hell of a lot easier when you have built-in childcare and a personal chef, and are living in a society that says it's fine for you to make art. It's not about how hard it is to make art; it's about how hard it is to make art as a woman and a mother in a society that doesn't support you and only sees one role for you: bearer of Great Artist's children, and Helpmeet.

Honestly, that stupidity makes me want to crack somebody upside the head. Or cancel my subscription. Doing that right now, in fact.

Watch the trailer. Go see the movie. Read the blog. More information here.

Cross posted at Dowsing. H/t to Art Biz Blog]

Squee! Abcedarian Book Finally Shipping!

I've been drooling over this book ever since I first saw the video, what seems like a million years ago. What is it about abcedarian collections that makes them so attractive? It's not as if we don't all know our ABCs and need a reminder. And adding pop-up fun to it just makes it more delectable. Although the subject is very simple, this looks like a fairly delicate book, not necessarily one you'd give to a child. Anyway, it's now available from Amazon, and that's why I'm reposting the video.

Catching Up: Google Reader Gleanings

Some interesting gleanings from my massive attempt to catch up on my Google reader. I'm behind because (for one thing) my friend Helen was over here trying to get her new pied-a-terre into habitable shape. She's picked some fabulous fabric for her custom-made bedframe but we had a hellish time trying to find bedding to match it, and still haven't succeeded. There were things I thought matched that she didn't and things she thought matched that I didn't. Since she's got to live with it, her opinion obviously has more weight than mine, but it got me thinking about how we perceive color. I know that as our eyes age, they tend to yellow up: hence the wild rouge and lipstick you see on so many older women. So when I stumbled across this color perception test on Extreme Cards and Papercrafting (a great blog,  BTW), I jumped at the chance to see how good I was. I ended up with a score of 16 on a scale where 0 is perfect and 99 is, well, partially color blind, I would guess. Go take it and see how you do.

Then Blue Tea mentioned a great, royalty-free textures site, CG Textures, that I'll be referring back to for backgrounds for photomanips. I'm always on the lookout for royalty free stuff, but many of them place restrictions on using their images for commercial work; this one doesn't, as long as you're not reselling their textures as textures, i.e., competing with them.

You know that fab 500 Handmade Books that just came out, that everyone's drooling over (including me)? Lark Books has a podcast of one of the jurors,  Steve Miller, the head of the University of Alabama's Book Arts Program, talking about the jury process. (H/T to Cai Lun). Very illuminating, if you're thinking about submitting your work to any juried show at any point.

Hearkening back to days of printing presses, Green Chair Press has a great kit for making "single sheet" books, where all the pages are laid out on one sheet of paper then printed, cut apart and fastened into a signature. If layout mystifies you, as it often did me until I got the hang of it, this will clear things up for you. For $10, you get instructions for five different books, 3 different books to make, and a Word template.

And I'm now completely captivated by the blog Wynken de Worde, which takes its name from one of the earliest medieval English printers. It's written by Sarah Warner, director of the undergrad program at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has got to be one of the top ten jobs in my former field. It makes me sick with jealousy. Lately, she's been writing about the marginalia in various books in the library: sketches, notes, huffy responses to the author. I find marginalia endlessly entertaining; it's like having a conversation with your books, and with their future readers. Someday, I'm going to do a book that's nothing but collected marginalia.

Okay, all caught up. Let's see how long that lasts. ;^)

Artists' Books Conference & Show in NYC

Just a quick note to let people know there's a conference on artist's books coming up: ARLIS/NY Contemporary Artists' Books Conference on Oct. 23–26, 2008. This is being held in conjunction with Printed Matter and the New York Art Book Fair. The last time I went to the latter,  I was rather disappointed as it concentrated not on what I think of as artists' books, but on books published by artists about their art and exhibitions. Looking over the exhibitors, that still seems to be largely the case, though Booklyn will be there, as will Purgatory Pie Press, one of my favorites. The conference seems to mix both ideas up together, which is not surprising since it's co-sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of New York. Can't decide whether I'm going to either of these. I may pop into the book fair, since I missed it last year due to Jen's wedding.

Bad Blogger! No Hits!

Swamped, that's what I've been. Three classes, one guest, too many friends to keep up with (yeah, what a thing to gripe about, LOL) and a partridge in a pear tree. I'm so brain-dead I couldn't think how to spell pear. Pair? Pare? Duh. It's teacher brain; you start thinking your students' mistakes are actually right. EEEEEEEK. I hope I'll be caught up again by next week. Hang tight.