These are the cover views of two new books that include textiles, stitch, woven shifu and white line printmaking. They also have been colored with some of my watercolors made from the soils of Australia. The one on the left has one of my favorite colors, Burke and Wills Track Gold Ochre. Here are some views of their pages.
This one is called Songline and the one below is Land Marks.
There are envelopes placed next to stitched in prints in this book. Here it is holding a bit of shifu made from a thai kozo paper that I clean up the glass sheet and muller with after processing watercolors.
I am planning on returning to Australia to teach another six day masters class and then a intensive textile and pigments class for three days. To those I will add another class at the Baldessin Press Studio where I go to relax and surround myself with printmaking and interesting people. Hopefully this time I will be able to spend some extra time with favorite students that have returned to my classes over and over again. We would just like to share space while we work together. No teaching and no expectations other than what we place on ourselves. Forays out for flat whites and an occasional dinner would be also be in order. I will start looking for a good place to meet up. It is not too early to start planning.
There are very interesting fellow teachers along the way at the conferences but I have always preferred to spend my time with the students. After all they are why I am there in the first place. Many students can name the teacher who has inspired them the most but for me it is the students, So we are going to make a plan and see if it can work out for all of us.
A note on my last blog. The novella is now in the hands of an editor. When I hear from her I can start to either begin again with another story or just see where her comments lead me.
Tomorrow I take some large canvases off to a new gallery. They have been hanging in the studio since their first outing two years ago. The blank walls are going to follow the blank book shelves as I begin to rid myself of the “unnecessary”.
I might just have to print up and bind the last five of the Circus Diner Books. My collector has disappeared, our waitress is heading off to a new career at the casino and I have finished the Dog series. Now I will spend Sunday mornings working on “Napkin Wrapper Occupations.” It is doubtful there are many more books that I will produce in limited editions. Other book artists can get over $200 per book and I am lucky to get the cost of ink and paper and a fraction of my time at $20 each on an edition of only twenty. “Occupations” might be just too hard for me to resist. Since I will be the new collector, I can see them all gathered at the end of the series at a jobs market or meeting up in a diner. Some of them could even go on dates. All these thoughts and I haven’t even starting tearing the paper. Which by the way has returned to the old maroon and white. More later.
That’s it for the week.