PAM's Artist & Book Exhibition

On our recent trip to Portland, Oregon, we saw the Artist & Book show at the Portland Art Museum. To see in the real so many works I love was a thrill. Several original screenprints comprising Joseph Albers' book of color studies, Formulation: Articulation, were there, as well as the seven woodcuts by Martin Puryear that accompany a new edition of Jean Toomer's 1922 novel, Cane. 

a screenprint from Joseph Albers' Formulation: Articulation

a woodcut by Martin Puryear

a woodcut by Martin Puryear

a woodcut by Martin Puryear

Amy Uyeki's Award Winning Animation "Searchlight Serenade"

Join me at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles this Saturday, July 13th at 2 p.m!

cell from Amy Uyeki's animated film created from woodcuts and drawings

I'll be there to see the award winning documentary, Searchlight Serenade: An Animated Tale Told in Song, which features the accounts of World War II Japanese American internees who created big bands while incarcerated. The bands played for dance events inside the camps and also travelled outside to dance halls around the area. The documentary includes interviews with 9 detainees about their music and experience at that time. It also features an evocative animation created from woodcuts and drawings by Northern California artist, Amy Uyeki. Get more information about the event here.

The new documentary won an award at the Big Island Film Festival in Honolulu this summer.

Composition with Cat

Sophie stars in this post, as is his due.

A New Series Begins

Eight screens... count 'em... EIGHT screens with newly burned photo-emulsion stencils  and sides taped off,  READY TO GO!!!

I'm beginning a new series of mixed media works on paper featuring plants and patterned backgrounds. These eight screens will serve as a trial: I'll print them, each printed on top of the others to build up a very transparent set of abstracted plant leaves. If I like what I end up with, I've got a direction. If I don't, then I'll start all over.

Book As Art

Joe has been helping me prepare for a book project down the road by collecting old, tattered books with interesting titles and old-style covers. I'm not quit sure how this project will evolve, but I'm taking as inspiration Joseph Cornell's Manual of Marvels, recently published by Thames & Hudson in as accurate a copy as possible.


Here is Joseph Cornell's book, outside and inside:

What is instructive to me is that Cornell created his own art book of collaged pages from a found book written in French, which he did not speak. He seemed to like the elegance of the column design, the black and white illustrations intermixed with the text, the beauty of the typeface. So, his interest was the use of the book as a visual jumping off point, not in terms of written content as a connection. He used the columns of text as background elements and added found imagery and line work to the illustrations to create his own small tableaus.