Tuesday 31 March 2020

Losing the Plot

Today was a Losing the Plot sort of day; normally I would then go and have a really long brisk walk, but I couldn't even get out to the graveyard for fresh air until after 5pm  as waiting in for essential food deliveries....
It started ok but once I start looking and reading about Tarot cards I go into imagination overload.
I routinely draw on tracing paper , it has such a nice surface, and then I can instantly reverse any reasonable ones onto the woodblock, or just let all the drawings fall on top of each other - a palimpsest of dreams...but always tending towards overload....
sometimes I agonise over actually which way round I prefer the images - usually i feel strongly the right psychological way round is best, but then the 'shock of the new' seeing them reversed sometimes makes me dither...
sometimes when I can't decide I cut them both ways - it can be quicker than dithering and I can try out other different things when cutting them too....


I did this image both ways for Ship of Fools and it was useful when I came to printing over newspaper images as sometimes one way round was definitely better than another.....
I did find it very annoying that the last batch of plywood turned out to be pink in the middle though...most disconcerting.

I studied the last woodcut I made last night first thing - The Hanged Man is also called sometimes Hanging Man in some packs; mine is definitely 'suspended' topically. is he caught up by his incipient bandages? My reading investigations told me that hanging from one foot was a punishment for debtors - climate debt for my Fool now maybe; or he could be hanging on the World Tree like Odin possibly - redemption by suffering; Odin tends to muscle in on my imagination frequently , must be my Viking genes....
I did loads of scribble drawings but not many focused enough to share even with you today;
it was more productive a day today perhaps in what I rejected in what could be seen.
I meandered around various enticing figures, Fortitude, Hermit, Wheel of Fortune and Magician....I am considering re-cutting  the image below smaller for my pack - as the High Priestess perhaps, she was based upon Isis


She was on the cover and title page of one of the books I did with James Simpson - see post for April 2017......I think she might belong in the forest....possibly....



A Tree Hermit looked as if he might join these already done trees, I really need to sort out the dogs a bit.....; he also follows on from a Diogenes like figure I used in The Man in the Moon - see post August 2013 ( was it really that long ago?....)



And if you can decipher it I was interested in a Falconer figure; I liked the idea of a tree of birds, (which I did before based on an old German woodcut) placed on a fabric on top of what might be a man or a tree or both - the falcon is up on the top left hand corner - on a branch or arm.....
I love watching birds of prey when we go out for walks, and I did a whole installation back a long while ago called The Falcon Bride - you can see it on my website archive carolyntrant.co.uk  and scroll down the left hand side til you see Falcon Bride Installation.....

By 5.30 I managed to escape from decisions and sat in the graveyard to sit and ponder life's big questions - like how long do you quarantine a TLS that came through the door, as a diversion, and was rewarded by seeing a green woodpecker at last  - I know where it hangs out and it cackles non-stop, teasing me - but this time it came straight for me at low-level before suddenly seeing me and deviating at the last moment; it retreated a bit and hung out on some gravestones so I could admire it; and came back again later - bliss; finally felt more at peace again......

I did manage to cut a new block - The Magician 


I'll tell you about him tomorrow....

Once I get these images out of my system it will feel like removing a splinter...
I ought to be binding the cartoneras and getting the cardboard covers off the printing press
then I will be able to see what I have actually got to play with next......

Monday 30 March 2020

Tarot Trees

Today I felt drawn back to more small playing card images and checking out on Tarot images again - The Tower and The Hanged Man were calling to me for some reason. The small cards are such a lovely way of story-telling, asking to be shuffled and re-arranged to tell many different narratives....


(these are ones I did before - see post a year ago - they have nice backs too, very fiddly to make!)

Looking up The Tower I found an image of a male and female figure falling, and thought - should I have a Fool and Fool-ess in emancipated times, when 'man' no longer necessarily means humankind; my figures are supposed to be fairly androgynous , so tightly bound up... but hmmmm....

I did do some hanged women before, tho really they are just having a nice night out...

The Hanged Man traditionally represents a change of allegiance or point of view - very relevant now then after 10 years of 'austerity', and The Tower is a symbol of judgment, a wake up call by cosmic forces perhaps....
I could complete this trilogy with Fortitude in face of tribulation, traditionally a figure overcoming a lion - not many lions in the woods round here , though wild boar now roaming fearlessly in empty streets in towns and cities in Spain and Catalonia where my son lives he tells me...
The Wheel of Fortune would also be good - as it turns it is the great leveller in society, and The Hermit is usually shown with an hour glass, time again, the sands of time running out.....
The Fool is the 22nd card of the tarot but not numbered - like our packs with a Joker.

But I don't want to get to drawn into all this  - I mostly feel a strong visual connection for my Fool with Tower and Hanged Man - and possibly tomorrow The Magician - card of change and transformation, fecundity and dreams, and The Falconer, with a bird on his wrist, would be good images for my trees......
I remember writing about Elisabeth Bowen in my Women Artists book and she described how many more people had 'strange deep intense' dreams during the second world war....

Why am I so interested in Tarot ? I do feel some of these images are still locked deep within us as firmly as abc - they are tools to communicate with when thinking about the inexplicable....Digital storytelling has taken new turns but still relies on fantasy worlds with often recognisably old medieval tropes, and I have always loved ideas and imagery from the Middle Ages; perpetually on the cusp of new technologies they seem so like us, excitable but not yet world weary. Tarot cards possibly appeared first in Ferrara, one of my favourite Italian cities, but these were also based on remnants of Egyptian books of wisdom.
My 'tarot' cards no way adhere to any system in particular - printed over newspaper images I use the term to describe the effect of palimpsests on the brain, stimulating ideas and connections in that way that cards are used for divination almost, a framework for personal and collective imagination.



The card on the left is actually based on the Tarot Fool card so I did do a woman fool last time; she is teetering on a precipice with her little dog - I should have photo-ed the Waite pack image for comparison - and then I printed her against a bit of a painting with a wonderful hunting cat on it...The Fool in Tarot is related to Diana the Huntress with her hounds....I found this out today long after I had done the image....



Sometimes the image behind suggests something really interesting, Parliament sitting, a Leonardo drawing, sometimes I have just chosen them for their good colour....I think it is probably quite hard to focus on them in the right way on the screen.

Playing card size and format, (they need to fit nicely in the hand), appeals to me greatly; when painting in tempera I loved working on little gesso-ed blocks you could hold in your hand like icons, with deep box frames that drew you into the picture, leaving the world of galleries for example behind...

By the end of the day today I had designed two more cards and started cutting them...adapted from a Ship of Fools image and  a previous tarot card I did - I feel they will add more dimensions and edge to the tree/fool series forest; might do a couple more tomorrow....




Sunday 29 March 2020

Time Trees and Bandages

The hour changed this morning - BST - but I was lying awake earlier than ever ( thank goodness that 'early' will be later tomorrow and I can get up) in that wonderful hinterland time developing my Sick Fool story, progressing from small figures into a landscape (figuratively speaking, no bucolic landscapes here) - to a Dante-esque wood...


I already sketched in the beginning of some trees yesterday on the small cuts and now they will be at Dante's crossroads: I am sure that when this virus crisis is over things are not going to be quite the same again - it feels, hopefully, like a sort of turning point that it would be crazy to ignore, and might, just might, lead to decisions for a better world. make us think and act more humanely.....we can but hope.....
Our vulnerability, always there, is now daily exposed on radio and screen in strong images...
My Fool is now lying on a hospital trolley; the images need to be larger if only so I can show him diminished in a dark wood and by events.


I spent the day scribble drawing people on trolleys, and bandaged trees.....I am feeling a need now to tear up strips of newspaper to glue onto some stronger paper, for painting and printing on - part of the unravelling process.....
Goodness how I have railed against hospital trolleys and wheelchairs in too many opera productions over the last few years, beginning with Peter Sellars wonderful Theodora, then Magic Flute, and thereafter ubiquitous - but perhaps they really are symbols for our times, used judiciously...

I just read a wonderful poem this morning too in bed, by Thomas Hardy, by chance evoking scars and bandages too as long ago as 1915 *

Logs On The Hearth
A Memory Of A Sister

The fire advances along the log
Of the tree we felled,
Which bloomed and bore striped apples by the peck
Till its last hour of bearing knelled.
The fork that first my hand would reach
And then my foot
In climbings upward inch by inch, lies now
Sawn, sapless, darkening with soot.

Where the bark chars is where, one year,
 It was pruned, and bled -
Then overgrew the wound. But now, at last,
Its growings all have stagnated.
My fellow-climber rises dim
From her chilly grave -

 Just as she was, her foot near mine on the bending limb,
Laughing, her young brown hand awave.

December 1915.



Fortunately I had just had a wonderful walk in a wood before lockdown, and taken lots of pictures to inspire me....it had just been heavily coppiced, mixed feelings....

I was an inveterate tree climber as a child, a good excuse for hugging them  and can feel again the texture of the bark, knobs and ridges, sap seepings and congealings, scars of pruning, insect burrowing and infestations - I used to fantasize about creatures living in trees behind scars which looked like doors, and made libations of coloured sugar crystals stolen from my mother's 1950's coffee mornings - so magical....
The protective bindings around new saplings are like bandages too - I made a woodcut of some for use in Ship of Fools tho never added the bandages in the end - I was going to use bits of sellotape on the block to affect the printing more subtly than cutting - and still can if I use it in future...


woodblock with offset ink

Logs on the Hearth is about time too, and more time, albeit strange time, is what some of us have in our isolation...
* I am reading Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture by Jonathan Dollimore,  which is full of wonderful poetry, and its a good time to read it just now... Dollimore conflates desire with movement - and that is what for us at the moment is limited, just as bandaging limits movement while things heal.....

Saturday 28 March 2020

Fools paradise...

Fool cycles are deep in my psyche, partly through the work and writings of Cecil Collins, and partly through a love of medieval stories and images - Sebastian Brant's book The Ship of Fools, with fun woodcuts, some by Durer, and the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch - I travelled a lot in the Low Countries with my parents during the fifties and into the sixties visiting less well know and better known galleries and museums in Belgium and Holland , and in Germany, and was always more au fait with Flemish so-called Primitives at first then Italian ones, they came quite a bit later, and also much loved.

Cecil, and his artist wife Elisabeth, were good friends of Peggy Angus, who taught me art from the age of 11: one of the  first painting projects I remember being set at school was to paint a Poet or a Fool asleep under a tree and I think we were shown images by Chagall and Collins for inspiration.

Cecil's wife Elisabeth who actually the made the first drawing of a Fool; they were both friends of Eric Gill and lived near him for some time at Piggotts - he introduced them to the writing of Jacques Maritain and ideas about the purity of consciousness which for Cecil became embodied in his drawings and writings about The Fool. All Gill's discussions about this were always directed at Cecil rather than Elisabeth - I will refrain from further comment about this but  all that I am writing is extended in my book Voyaging Out - about Women Artists -see post below 28 April 2019 and September 2019;
I really love Elisabeth's work although Cecil's interests me too, particularly his ideas about mark making.


One of my artist friends who was taught by him told me had seen one of my earliest London exhibitions, early 70's? group show at the Acme Gallery I think, and liked my work - I learned this only recently sadly, I never met him but wish that I had.

In Voyaging Out I wrote...
 A romantic figure, the fool could also be a seditious one. Writing about the state of Britain in 1948, historian David Kynaston notes the long-standing popularity of the comedian Norman Wisdom, ‘a seeming simpleton…The Gump, that most unwittingly subversive of post-war figures, ensuring without apparently meaning to that the best laid plans of his social superiors never came to fruition’. The Collins’s support for the idea of a ‘Fools’ Day’ mirrored the idea that, as Kynaston puts it, in a still rigidly stratified society ‘every now and then the underdog would have his day’, when the world would be temporarily turned upside down for a short period of alternative reflections.
Its a delightful idea, now somewhat tainted by the new turn taken by populism, so probably safer to stick with more generalised mythic images, medieval, and Tarot - a hanged man Fool maybe, and the wonderful Tyl Eulenspiegel ( owl mirror - I love it ) who met his end on a gibbet after years of mischief-making....
If my fool is Everyman, where will he end up in an increasingly complex world...

What I like in making my sort of cartoneras printed over current newspaper pages, is using emblematic woodcut figures printed over current events and seeing what happens, what resonances, with lots of elements of chance thrown in.

Not much else to show today - have cut some more small trial images; unsure of the ethics of non-essential deliveries ( although for me regular deliveries of Asian plywood are essential deliveries) I
have been using the backs of old cuts , just in case we are in for a long haul; not ideal but better safe than sorry.





All this show-and-tell about what I have achieved in a day is beginning to feel like a fairy tale - or like Gawain and the Green Knight: the Green Knight brings back his kill from hunting, a fox, a boar and a stag - and Gawain presents a kiss(?) and a girdle and something else I can't remember tho I certainly should having made an Artists Book  of the story....



Friday 27 March 2020

More Foolish Things

Perhaps I should have explained further some of my references yesterday - Frankenstein is in my mind because I just read and enjoyed finishing reading Frankisstein  - I loved its playfulness and insights and how Jeannette Winterson explored Mary Shelley's book's relationship to Artificial Intelligence now. I love the original book and Mary Shelley is fascinating as a person.
I then read Rupert Thomson's Katherine Carlyle, about a young woman who seemed to remember being an embryo fertilised in vitro, and then being frozen for 8 years before being implanted in utero and being born older than her years. She felt abandoned by her father after her mother died while she was still in her teens and sets off for the frozen north.....so lots of Frankenstein/Shelley connections here too...( it is so nice to have time to read now without feeling slightly guilty....) Rupert Thomson always writes interesting books but never seems quite to get his due....




Tristan - I have seen several versions of Wagner's opera, including one with stunningly dramatic enactments of Tristan's self destruction in tearing at and flinging off his bandages while waiting for death and Isolde. I suppose I could have also mentioned toilet rolls here as they seem to be on everyone's mind at the moment ( and what is an artist for if not to pick up on the zeitgeist) - much like paper bandages, with such potential visually and metaphorically....as has the delicious word  'unravelling'.....
In The Untenanted Room, two versions of which I did with poet James Simpson, I showed Perceval as a Holy Fool with a bandaged head....
Using references from my previous work is what I seem to do all the time - it is like making yogurt: using a spoonful of the previous work acts as fermentation  to set the next batch of images....

and shopping trolleys are self-explanatory and very topical too.....

if we consume too much of the world we get sick.
The virus, alongside Climate Crisis, is a wake-up call.

These are healing trees are apotropaic, protective guardians we should love and respect; today I started cutting them in wood to be printed for my playing card forest





When I am teaching woodcutting people always ask - how do I get the images onto the block? I try and discourage making pencil drawings and tracings , although reversing images so they will end up the right way round again sometimes needs some technical assistance I agree, but I say they mustn't be 'drawings' but maps, plans of roughly where things are going to go in relation to the block, and each other, for guidance - but flexible, subject to endless change and thinking on the hoof once you start cutting ; a pencil drawing is a pencil drawing , a woodcut is a woodcut. People forget that even a pencil line has a width, and 2 pencil lines to denote a solid limb or branch can be very misleading.....you are dealing with mass not line, and a binary system of on or off, left or cut away....

so on this tiny playing card scale I did make these drawings but everything started changing as I was cutting




 Tomorrow I will start cutting the Sick Fools and talk about Cecil Collins...
meanwhile if you are baffled and haven't picked up some of the connections with past posts - posts about the playing cards are back on the post for January 2019
they are an ongoing project....
Descriptions of cartoneras are back on the post for 16 March 2019
The Ship of Fools ones are printed over newspaper pages containing photos or articles relating to climate change and flooding......see below


Thursday 26 March 2020

Sick Fools and the Healing Wisdom of Trees

Positive thought for the day - at least when I can finally show things at my next un-cancelled show I won't be taking along books with slightly inkwet pages...

on the other hand I have now got so deep in new ideas that the next stage of binding the sewn cartoneras is receding into the distance; but I have plenty of time now....
I got straight up and started thinking over more ideas; first I went for my constitutional around the graveyard, trying to avoid the times that are getting a bit crowded with dogwalkers....

I found myself thinking about chance and portents - yesterday my hank of special grey coloured bookbinding thread ran out  just as I finished sewing up the last book - there was a good feeling about this - an 'amount you can plough in a day' sort of feeling....
and then first thing when I opened my British Museum catalogue of the Egyptian day of the Dead (which suddenly looked as if it might be useful) it fell open at the page with a figure 'receiving liquid from a tree goddess' - lovely , I knew it was going to be useful for my meditations on sick fools and the healing and wisdom of trees; it is quite an unusual image.....


Once back I carried on browsing and made more scribbles in my notebook, alongside yesterdays bandaged fools with shopping trolleys, meditations on Frankenstein, the odd deposition, unravellings...  the great thing about a sketchbook of ideas is to mix up all the drawn images together and they start to make new connections.
At the end of a day like yesterday it is hard to feel whether you have achieved anything, it can feel like idling - but you probably have and your dreams the next night might sort things out further.....  

I am beginning to see how the Sick Fool idea can now join with the tree images I started to make as new set of playing card images, might all meet up together. I might start cutting some more tomorrow, although some feel they will also need to be developed bigger - size matters and images demand their own size sometimes; the playing card ones are very small but are useful for trying ideas out


these are some of the previous ones I did - trial runs with some miniature Ship of Fools images too - I was going to try out making some sort of peepshow forest with them but had to stop to finish other things
here are a couple of blocks too....
and below some of the drawings they were based on - I was using particular trees that I love from my regular walks  - they may look a bit faint as in pencil.... I really love the ones I can stand inside and almost wear like a coat....and ones with extraordinary faces




I will try and have some of the new ones I will start cutting to show tomorrow; I have been distracted by the wonderful 8pm moment of people in my road opening their windows and doors and clapping for the NHS workers; lots of us did, including the next door dog barking which added to the volume; so good to do as my friends further down have two family members on the front line , running a corona ward...
and John Tomlinson told Sean Rafferty when on Radio 3 at 6pm he might sing out of his window but we couldn't hear him in the clear night air sadly, he's a few roads away.....he sang happy birthday to his neighbour yesterday through the house wall with his big deep bass voice and they could hear and banged back....

Wednesday 25 March 2020

All Sewn Up - more micro ramblings....



Such a lovely sunny day it was hard to find a dark corner to photo these - but all done now. I don't usually do as many cartoneras as 22 at a time but with all this enforced time.....
the last sets were more like 12 I think....

I got excited about some new possible images forming in my mind yesterday evening but today the impetus for continuing sewing up over-rode doing anything about them straight away - I only had a couple more to do....this is called the gumption trap. By the afternoon I realised those murky images lurking in my creative centre were getting fainter, less embodied in my hands and legs - yes legs, I need to roam around looking at stuff and trying things out; in better times I would probably walk down the road not talking to anyone while inside my head it was a ferment ( had to make do with a quick twirl round the graveyard opposite today but now that is getting crowded with desperate walkers and dogs)
 - but though still excited I am putting things off...

this is where the cosily therapeutic of sewing kicks in, and it can also seem so sensible and virtuous, getting it done and finished  ( lordy shouldn't be using that phrase again, tainted forever)
- but it is the gumption trap having a small victory and the creativity suffering.
I could make a whole extrapolation from this, comparing the bourgeois life style, sensible reasoning and getting some sleep, up there with tidiness and cleanliness, with the mad artist in a garret but I won't linger with it....
A propos -I have been reading a wonderful book written in the mid eighties I think by Robert Irwin, The Limits of Vision ( thanks Rose - a wonderful present) - it is very darkly funny and horribly insightful; and very topical as it is all about microbes and obsessions....


but I digress.....

I have another  woman friend, an artist, who once told me she always worked 'cold' - waited to see if an idea lasted and was therefore truly worth doing; its an interesting idea with a logic to it - but I think I operate best on ' hot', for good or ill ( and I am always very hot physically when I am working, the calories burning off the top of my head) although the gumption trap is always lurking, especially first thing in the morning even tho I am a morning person ( as well as a night owl). 
But by the afternoon today I was scribbling some preparatory drawings in my fat notebook and once started didn't want to stop.
It is going to be very hard to post photos as they are very faint and wispy - ideas sometimes so fragile that I am cautious to commit them too firmly to paper before their time; they are imagination stimulators like Leonardo's blots on the walls; James the poet I work with says he is the only person who can extrapolate anything from them at this sort of stage but it is because we are so used to rummaging around in each others heads....
more tomorrow....

Tuesday 24 March 2020

bookmaking corona diary day/part 2; sewing up...

Sewing up is usually therapeutic but for the newspaper pages for cartoneras it is fraught with danger and you have to be constantly alert.....the paper is so fragile, now more a palimpsest of layers of ink rather than paper. The pages are thin enough to do a pamphlet sewing stitch really but then it doesn't work for the pagination because I have printed across a whole newspaper page image which is then folded to a more manageable size.
I usually want to work like a maniac and and get one job finished at a time but with 22 of these I think it needs to be staggered, alternated with some thing more creative, but I am finding it hard and the constant interruptions trying to co-ordinate new deliveries of food and milk with my immediate neighbours isn't conducive to long trains of thought so repetitive work to drop in and out of is useful  - tho I notice how it takes a few minutes to get back into the rhythm as I was describing yesterday...
The overwhelming smell of printing ink on these particular pages is mitigated by the glorious smell of Spring flowers sent by my daughter.....



The new etiquette of deliveries and social distancing. plus the accompanying hand-washing is playing havoc with my disappearing nails and rough skin is just not good for book-binding dexterity....

Getting our newspaper is now difficult under this new regime of isolation so we may have to abandon it - I am suddenly assailed by the alarming thought that newspapers may all go online instead - and never return, then what will I do for future projects....the end of my cartoneras maybe; I was just starting to think about the sequel to Ship of Fools - which came after Map of Lost Cuckoos about species extinction , the next one was possibly going to be Fool Gets Sick...
good job I have boxes of papers still, my hoarding justified but the current topical ones could be  important.....I hope someone I know is saving them.....fortunately I did a big trawl for cardboard packaging round town before lockdown....
dealing with current events in this way is my way of communicating I suppose, first with myself, interrogating the world, and then by the showing to other people - which I hope will happen eventually...




Once sewn and bound the format - tall and narrow - makes the books surprisingly robust; I hope they look like little dossiers with their manilla coloured cardboard covers. They are supposed to look raw and immediate so I hope all this relaxed extra time hasn't made me fidget with them too much; maybe there are genuine improvements but opinion will probably vary South American cartoneras are now sometimes accused accused of looking too aesthetic....

I am usually a person who just likes to get things done but maybe now is the time for more reflection - in the daytime while sewing rather than in the middle of the night maybe...
a subject for tomorrow maybe .....

Monday 23 March 2020

Covid Art Diary starts here Update on Spring events for parvenu press

I have been waiting for some final decisions but it is an ever-changing situation , however the Oxford Fine Press fair is now definitely cancelled for next weekend and due to take place in November instead - but given the rather ageist nature of this virus and current rumours and advice, whether some of us will ever get there remains to be seen.
London Craft week has been also been postponed until the early Autumn - I was due to take art with work at the ArtWorkers Guild in Holborn;
also at Turn the Page - TTP - at the Forum in Norwich, this has also been postponed until May next year 2021- which will hopefully be a more virus free zone and something to look forward to.....
I was excited that my book Map of Lost Cuckoos about small wildlife under risk of extinction in Britain, which I sold to the British Library last year, was being displayed there next to the original Magna Carta I was told by friends...but that library is now closed and I haven't been able to get up to London and look......

I am still working hard on finishing books that were 'nearly there' for the Oxford Fair and although I now feel as though I have been given a rare gift of time and it is nice to be released from the pressure of deadlines, it feels strange, despite always working for my own satisfaction and as a matter of compulsion, to be working on things that no-one will see for possibly some time , and especially as some of the work was supposed to be quite topical....

So I may now use this blog currently to to think about work and time and as a diary in these new  circumstances - with images as the work gets finished and in different stages....
am currently working on binding the cartonera versions of the Ship of Fools - see previous post for the original version and scroll back to this time last year for stuff about cartoneras....

I am always accused of working too hard, but quite apart from doing what I love there are good practical reasons which make it inevitable. Making books as art dictates its own timescales. most of the processes are so arduous that they open up a conundrum: whether the result is going to be worth all the effort is a decision asking to be made at the point at which it quite impossible to know ; it has to be an act of faith - but one certainly wants to be done as quickly as possible, so one can find out. And also before it goes off the boil. And a new obsession comes pressingly along.

The practical processes have their own rhythms; stopping and starting alters the flow and shows - the knowledge of what I am doing lasts as long as the task and gets harder to retrieve; the muscle memory has its own duration and then moves on elsewhere - to the next task. Spending too long would be like taking a day to tell a joke. Momentum gathers so I stay up until it is done; it also means I don't have to clean my blocks too often and get back straight into work the next morning....

One trick is to know how to decide the number of pages and repeats from the start, in the same way that the measurement an acre is the amount a farmer can plough in a day. And it wasn't an accident that my first book, Gawain, was designed to be finished in a year and a day, just like the quest contained in the story.

And age is the elephant in the room too. Ars Longa Vita Brevis. So many ideas and so little time in which to follow them up.

more tomorrow - and hopefully soon some pics......

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Fine Press Book Fair 2020 Examination Schools Oxford



I will once again be exhibiting at the Fine Press Book Fair in Oxford 28-29 March.

Among other work ( paper theatres, tarot/playing cards, tunnel books etc - depending what gets finished!) - I will be showing new work with themes of Climate Crisis, Ship of Fools (with acknowledgement to Hieronymous Bosch and Sebastian Brant), as a woodcut concertina book and as cartoneras printed over newspaper pages featuring climate disasters of various types - see below for wet pages waiting to be cut and bound.

I will try and add more images and information as  I go on in the next couple of weeks.....

see the Fine Press Book Association website for further details about the fair.....