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......
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