Books I've Been Working On

The problem with making your own books to use as journals is that when you need a portfolio, everything you've made has been tossed around in your purse for a year and looks terrible.  A few weeks ago months ago (this post has been sitting in draft for a while) I needed to work up a small portfolio ......


leather, headband, marbled paper from Istanbul

 

flat back casing

regular old coptic

paper case binding with spine stitching, paper from Bangladesh

 

More Visual Journaling of Turkey

Remnants From The Orient Express

 Above is the ramshackle neighborhood where I later wrote:

Do I regret walking the winding road from the Chora church, along the Thessodosius walls, past a hundreds of years old syanagoge, past the old women leaving chicken necks for local cats and to the Egripike gate alone because some 10 year old, after being dared by his friends, raced around the corner and slapped my backside before disappearing into his house?  No.  I wish I had paid more attention to his quickening footsteps or walked faster when the group of boys crashed their kite, weighed down by a water bottle of sand, at my feet instead of looking up to see where it had come from but these are all choices we make as explorers.  

Yeah, it happens.

Paper Marbling

A little history and demonstration of the art.  My paints, gall and water thickening solution just arrived in the mail yesterday.  Next item of busineess:  get a rad red bandana.

Visual Journal: Istanbul

Before we left for Istanbul a few weeks ago I made a small journal with Arches water color paper.  I used coptic style binding to allow any page to lay flat for drawing or painting.  It was my first attempt at visual journaling a trip along the way and all and all it went pretty well.  I certainly did not fill up the whole thing in a week - it has been a work in progress since I got home which has actually added to the enjoyment for me.  I get to relive moments of my trip and use processes I couldn't manage with the small art kit I packed.

Istanbul Traveling Art Kit: 

5 Sepia toned  Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens
4 Black Micron Sakura pens in varying sizes
4 Watercolor paintbrushes: 2 round, 1 rigger, 1 flat
Handful of graphitint watercolor pencils
Needle and thread for sewing in extra pages, maps, receipts + sharpener and eraser in an Altoids box
Very small 12 color Lukas watercolor tin
2 tubes of gauche: copper & gold 

I found that when I drew from real life I didn't use pencils - I used my smallest ink pens and made lots of lines until I came upon the right one.  I also found that staying put in one place long enough to sketch something has imprinted those places much stronger in my memory.  I remember what the foaming yogurt drink tastes like or how cold it was outside the house with a tree growing through the front porch roof.  I usually sketched on site and painted in the evening while I listened to a fantastic book about Istanbul.  I know, heaven.

Here's what I will say about drawing:  for me it's a constant issue of confidence.  I have wanted to draw for years but never thought I was a "drawer".  I have several reference books and all the materials, but I didn't get serious about it until moving to Oman.  Every time I drew I became so embarrassed about my inability to make something look like I wanted it to or about what I now realized is just my personal style that I threw it away and didn't draw for weeks.  When I moved here I said "enough!"  and just started keeping a visual journal, the only rule being that I couldn't throw anything out and I had to draw something every week and then every day for a while.

I finally got comfortable drawing inside my house where no one could see and slowly started showing them to my husband.  But the idea of drawing in public where someone could look over my shoulder and see immediately what kind of an amateur I am gave me night sweats.   Enter vacation where no one knows you and will never see you again.  One of the many reasons I like to travel is that you become completely free from whatever idea of yourself you have or (and usually more trapping) the idea of you that the people around you have.  I didn't grow up making art and when I think about making art at home I feel a bit like a fraud.  So in Istanbul I threw the old non-drawing Brooke out the window and became Brooke who draws.  It was a really great experience and has increased my confidence for studio work at home.  I have been working from photographs of our trip now and I hope to have a completed book in a few weeks.      

Notes from our food tour

Map of Hagia Sophia

 

Marbling in Istanbul

 I showed up to the five story studio and sometimes home of Ali and Betul at 10:30 for a lesson in Turkish marbling  (5 stories of about 10 square feet each floor, think wide ladder instead of palace).  Paper marbling is a process by which multiple colors of paint are dropped onto the surface of treated water, mixed around to create a pattern (though not mixed together) and then transferred onto thin paper.  You see paper marbling at the beginning and ending of old books and it looks like, well, multi-colored marble.   My bookbinding teacher in Jerusalem was a paper marbler and I’ve been fascinated by it for years though too intimidated to try it myself.  Turkey has a long history of paper marbling with a unique brand of embellishment including flowers and leaves.

"It's sometimes called painting with water”  Betul says to me from her top floor studio where I am torn between jaw dropping views of Istanbul and what’s happening in the seaweed thickened water on the table in front of me.  Betul makes it look easy and while there is a kind of natural flow to raking and fanning the colors, my lines are no where near as uniform as hers and my peacock pattern is laughable – squished flat like a heavy sandwich instead of full like a balloon.  But I thoroughly enjoy the afternoon selecting colors, dropping them onto the sludgy water to see them expand and moving them with metal awls and rakes of various sizes.  I’m only kind of embarrassed when she selects a generic artsy English language playlist on spotify that starts with Simon and Garfunkel and includes many songs I already know.  Is my “type” so knowable? I think, being sure not to drip ox gall infused paint onto my black jeans.   But then I don’t care and I discover what ultramarine looks like with powder blue and crimson red.   

(Ignore the "musical credits" in the end - observing copyright
law won out in the end.  I am a librarian afterall.  Just pretend you
are listening to The Flaming Lips..)

After our session Ali invites me to stay for lunch that Betul’s mother has made.  It is a simple meal of fresh green beans with ground beef and the ubiquitous “Shepard’s Salad” known by a million names throughout the Middle East and North Africa: tomato, onions, cucumber, parsley, lemon, olive oil.   Betul’s mother teaches me the Turkish word for thank you and delicious and I watch first when a pail of creamy yogurt is placed on the table and then dip my spoon in after each bite along with everyone else. 

“Why did you choose paper marbling?” Ali asks me, given the other options of calligraphy, felting, tile painting and sedef – traditional Turkish wood block carving and printing.

Happiest I've ever been...perhaps

“I like the colors and the patterns....and the possibilities”

“Do they talk to you?  The colors, do they talk to you?”

Unsure of how to answer I cock an eyebrow towards Ali.

“They will.  He says.  Send your husband away. They won’t talk if he’s there.  But send him away and they’ll talk to you.”

Well, you heard the man Max.

It's not personal. 

Birthday Books

There was a time when  I only gave homemade presents.  And then I got embarrassed because who wants something with glue stains or crooked pages or made from hemp/fabric/buttons/leather/pipe cleaner?  And then I realized that they are actually awesome afterall.  Here are a few that I made a few months back for my work colleagues.