From The Journal

I finished a new journal last week - here are a few of my more successful pages.  

It's funny though, many of them are not my "best" drawing or the "best" use of technique, but pages that I made in unique circumstances or that were inspired by something particularly meaningful. 

Paper that I marbled my very own self in my kitchen

 On my trip to Brussels I took the SLOW train to Gent (I mean, really slow) and satisfied myself with recording all of the stops we made along the way from "Bruxelles-Midi" to "St. Pier - Gent".  Later that night I treated myself at a lovely neighborhood market with local sausages and cheese, fresh fruits and nuts. These were my first pages of the trip and though they are a little sparse, they got me started for the rest of the visit.

 Christmas Eve 2014.  I'd been drawing all break and just generally enjoying the beautiful Muscat weather.  After some last minute Christmas shopping we saw a tiny sliver of a moon hanging above some buildings.  The horizon was just starting to turn orange and I made Max wait in the car for a few minutes while I sketched an outline to watercolor later.  

   

Our sweet housekeeper's mother passed away last week and she left me a perfectly simple and expressive note. "I am so sad" it read.

Regardless of nationality or language, loss is something that translates.

The text behind the Sri Lankan woman is Sinhala, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka.       

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. 

Sweetness

I was trying to remember when I started calling you sweetness. I honestly don't know.  

  

My most recent book came from a short exchange between me and my husband.  At some point in our marriage my husband began calling me sweetness.  I'm a serial nicknamer and thus I have allowed him a few of his choosing.  

I first designed a print taken from the sucrose molecule and then printed it along with text of our short email chain.  I also printed the molecule pattern on the outside flypages. 

Then I bound the two sheets into a single signature using a butterfly stitch.  I secured the tale with a small silver bead I found in the Muttrah souk here in Muscat and a small pull tag.  I housed the book in a slipcase that has a small paper collage and the full sucrose image lightly transferred onto the front using gel medium.  

I've been trying to devise projects that are more meaningful than the blank journals I've been working on for the past few years.  I've found it more successful to start with text - something personal or meaningful to me and work out from there instead of devising the structure and working backwards.  

I've been more productive in my studio the last few months that the last two years combined - 

pictures forthcoming. 

Here's to a year of fruitful making.  

Antelope Lending Library

Believe in the power of libraries to empower and uplift?  Understand their integral role in community building and future shaping?

Consider donating to this project a friend of mine is working on.


No, I don't live in Iowa city and probably never will.  Does that matter?  Nope.   You don't have to either.  The collective good of libraries extends far beyond the cities they serve.

I know - I'm a bit late to the party.  Hurry!  

So Stop Complaining

The Golden Age for Writers

...is right now

By Stephen Marche

Read more: Writing Careers in 2012 - Stephen Marche on the Golden Age of Writers - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/features/thousand-words-on-culture/writing-careers-1212#ixzz2DzeAZEoW

Sperm Donor

Got your attention, huh?

The past few months I've been working on my artist book skills...and they haven't come easily.  I've wanted to make books about a lot of things lately: living in morocco, infertility, changing family dynamics, good books I've read, pictures I've taken, dogs and husbands I love, Moroccan rug prints, the list goes on and on.  But whenever I sit down to tell a story that is personal I'm completely bereft of ideas and enthusiasm.  I don't know if I'm afraid my technical skills won't live up to my emotional attachment to these ideas or what, but It took me 8 months to get halfway through a book about our trip to Portugal last year but then I hated it and dismantled it for parts.

So, Max and I have been pulling prompts from a grocery sack the last few weeks.  He has to write about them and I have to create a book around the prompt.  The first one we drew said "A Golf Caddy Learns a Dark Secret".  Since my reading and thinking habits trend non-fiction I immediately hit the google to research golf scandals and the like - thinking I'd take my inspiration from real life.  (Max wrote a delightful piece of fiction.  Our brains work very differently.)

I came across this crazy story about a caddy who claimed he was seduced by his golfer solely for the purpose of getting pregnant.  He later sued her saying he was an "unwitting sperm donor".  Close enough for me.  I know it's a super weird thing to make a book about, but for some reason it worked for me and I was able to try a few new techniques I'd been wanting to experiment with.

The design and construction are really simple - mostly I wanted to see if I could finish a task and stick to a theme.  Telling a story I had no personal attachment to was a really great exercise.  It let me step back and see what worked and what didn't and how to construct an idea using mostly images.  I think after a few more goes I'll be ready to tell my own stories.      

"Sperm Donor" 

 Accordion Fold  

Paper: Arches Cold Press, Ingres

Matte Medium Image Transfers 

  Text taken verbatim from newspaper clippings

Raven's Foot Binding

I've been carving out some great studio time lately and I've even FINISHED some books.   Last night I finished my first Raven's Foot Binding.

Raven's Foot, like a Coptic binding, features exposed stitches and hinges on the outside of the book instead of hidden away beneath glue and book cloth and other sundry junk.  But instead of knotting the threads together along the spine like a Coptic binding, you wrap them around a core which later becomes the "Raven's Foot" on the outsides of the cover.

I had to restart this book a few times to get the tension just right on the wrapping.  I'm still not 100% satisfied with the consistency of stitches along the spine, but that's why you practice.  Doy.  (Have I been watching My So Called Life on Hulu?  Maybe...)
 

18 cover holes, four signatures, two covers
and a wooden drawing  mannequin's foot.  

You have to sew on a little sewing frame which can make
things a bit wonky if your text block and the frame aren't properly weighted...as mine were not.  

And Blamo.  Waiting for the fly pages to dry on the inside.  

And thar she is.  The sewing holes got a bit stretched out
after sewing and un-sewing a few times, but you sew and you learn.    

One Good Shame Deserves Another

I'm still here! I'm still a librarian and I still read!

 To pay penance for my blog slacking, here is something shameful I keep on my laptop to remind me not to get too smarmy.  I wrote it my first year of library school.

 "My husband is convinced that the e-book will catch on and change the face of books forever, but I just don’t buy it. I am very enthusiastic about using technology in the library, but e-books - I just can't see them re-inventing the library."

 Actually, the best part about this is that before I read this note in my own handwriting, I read a short article written in 2008 wherein the author stated all the reasons why e-readers wouldn't catch on.

 "What an idiot" I say to myself...and then read my own astute agreement with the article.

 Wah wah. (like grown ups in Charlie Brown)

Book Review: American Pastoral

 

American Pastoral: Phillip Roth: Vintage: Fiction: 432

Roth's landmark novel takes on the insurmountable task of capturing what it means to be American through the lens of the turbulent sixties and seventies.  What Roth arrives at is not a bulleted list of characteristics and flashpoints (a seemingly American way to understand the world) but the reality that both personal and national identity are products of our perception and personal experience anyway. 

America represents tyrannical fascism and morally bankrupt violence to Seymour Levov's weather-underground-vietnam-war-protesting daughter but for himself, a Jewish business man in search of the American dream, it means freedom, industry, and wealth.   

For me, a good book asks more questions than it answers.  Nothing interests me less than a work of fiction that says "here is what the world is and how you should understand it".* **  Roth's book is the anti that book.  For some that's frustrating, but to explore the shifting paradigm of American identity during this time and how it caused us to question the construction of identity itself, it's perfect.  But make no mistake, this novel isn't about a twenty year period in America's history - it's about narrative and national identity.   It's about all the stuff that came before 1968 and what will come after it. 

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have honest relationships with other people.  Trying to really understand them for who they are and not for what you'd like them to be or who you imagine them to be because that's the kind of person you fancy yourself having a relationship with.  It's a hard thing to be really know someone and have your interaction be true - have it be about their reality and not your perception of yourself.  How much harder, then, is it to understand a national identity, to form a relationship with it, when it is composed of such diverse people and experiences?  




*Interesting...that's probably why I don't really like fantasy...hhmm

** But I do love non-fiction.  That's the kind of "this is the world" I'm into :)

Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Perennial: Fiction: 464


One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the multi-generational Buendia family in the fictional town of Macondo. After founding the town, familial patriarch Arcadio Buendia sets the blueprint for an inescapable pattern of obsession, selfishness, and vice that plagues the generations of his family throughout the book. Different familial incarnations temporarily triumph and escape their history, but it is almost always short lived. Told in seamless magical realisim, this novel is at once visceral and dreamlike.

Sometimes my favorite books are ones I don't quite know what to do with when I'm finished - I don't know what to make of it or how to fully understand its themes. One Hundred Years of Solitude was a bit of that for me. All the same, I enjoyed its fantastical story telling and the way it touched on issues of nostalgia, obsessiveness, family, and the power we have over our own history - or don't as the case may be. After reading more about the history of Columbia, for which Macondo is said to be a substitute, I understood the book a bit better in terms of a critique of Latin American history.

Not really an upper... and a bit of a "must...slog...through...this... section" at times, but I'm glad I read it.    

Open Access Journals

A little presentation I made for my reference class last semester.

Forgive the poor sound quality.

Technology + Ancient Art = Awesome

Read the full article here, but the gist is, a music artist and a Turkish paper marble artist, having never met, put together a music video for the band's new song.


"Lucky Me" by Project Jenny, Project Jan from sammy rubin on Vimeo.

This is why technology and ancient arts can and should have a long and healthy marriage together. 

 

Me, a Master?

I submitted my master's thesis project from a hotel room in New York in the week hours of the night a few days ago and I just found out that I passed!  Barring any catastrophe with my reference class this semester and its remaining two assignments, I am finished with grad school!!!!

It has been a wonderful program and a great experience.

Yahoo.  

Best Article Ever

My sweet cousin Jentry sent me a link to this NPR article titled "In Which, Emphatically And Forever, I Decline To Care About How Books Smell."


It says it much better than I attempted to and it's funny to boot.

SShhh, don't tell him about the Kindle

or the host of other very successful e-readers on the market today. In preparation for my thesis project I have been going back over my old notes from my coursework.  I read this article entitled "10 reasons why the internet is not a substitute for the library" and this reason got me riled about my favorite soap box topic.

#6 Hey, Bud, You Forgot about E-book Readers

Try reading an e-book reader for more than a half-hour. Headaches and eyestrain are the best results. Besides, if what you’re reading is more than two pages long, what do you do? Print it. Where’s a tree hugger when you really need one? Moreover, the cost of readers runs from $200 to $2,000, the cheaper ones being harder on the eyes. Will this change? Doubtless, but right now there’s no market forces making it change. Will it change in less than 75 years? Unlikely! A-freakin-men!

How silly must he feel right about now when Kindle sales exceeded 8 million last year?

I don't disagree that libraries are very important for many reasons, but I reject the idea that libraries are at war with technology.  In fact, if you work in a library or have ever been in one, you know that is just plain silly.   

Have you seen those "I pledge to read the written word" icons on blogs?  As if to suggest that printed words are better, more enlightened than digital ink and that authors need our tactile observance to survive and write good books.  My husband and I have contemplated creating an "I pledge to only read cuneiform on stone tablets" icon for my blog, but that seemed a bit too snarky.  

The point is, reading is reading and one form, as long as it works for you, is not superior to another.  But what about potentially loosing your e-books?  E-books don't really let you own titles.  What about the feel of a book in your hands? I love a real book for those reasons - but they are not about reading; they are about having, owning and touching - not bad things - but not about content consumption.

Luddites and techies - we are all in this together.  Buy or check out, download or pull back the cover, paper or digital, whatever.  Just read.