Roz Wound Up

Adventures in Book Binding: The Tableful of Nideggen Journals

Above: the full batch of regular size Nideggen journals. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

The above photo of mine doesn't do justice to the range of colors in the books' fabric and decorative papers, but people following the current saga of the Nideggen batch of books will enjoy this overview of the completed books. (The two smaller books made in this batch were shown on my July 6 post.)

There is something wonderful that happens when you get that cloth and decorative paper wrapped around a bookboard! Papers that might have looked "marginal" before simple glow in their new incarnation. (To see the papers before they were bound see my July 3 post.) This is of course a great argument for making more and more books and seeing how this transformation happens. Before you discount a dubious piece of decorative paper I hope you'll push forward and discover this for yourself as well. My students are always pleasantly amazed and I am always thrilled with their results.

Canada Geese—And a Sort-of Quiz

Above: gesture drawings of Canada geese, made from my Subaru as they walked by. Read more about this below. Scanner cut of text at right: "walked past the car." Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Today marks 9 months of more than daily posting and I have some questions (and a prize) for readers at the end of this post, but first…

Yesterday I drove out to White Bear Lake (about 30 minutes from my home) a small town that is now really a north east satellite suburb of the Twin Cities metro area. It still has lovely wild areas in it, however. On my drive home, while driving through a business park, I saw a gaggle of Canada geese crossing the road. I pulled over, slowing the car quickly and then gradually creeping forward. By the time I coasted to the gaggle, they were almost all across the road and feeding in the grass at the side of the road, next to my Subaru. The car was off, the windows closed, the temperature rising, but I didn’t want to frighten the geese with any mechanical noises. I reached for a pen and my journal and started to sketch. Sadly the pen I grabbed was an almost dried out .1 Staedtler Pigment Liner. These are fantastic pens, but even they have a life span, that pen was at the end of its time. The still stiff and fine point actually carved into the paper and I had to dig down to get firm black lines, but I managed to get some gestures of the birds as they moved past the car and towards the marshy and reed-filled depression they were living in, at the side of the office park. I even had a chance to slap some watercolor down, before the last one walked through the wall of green weeds and disappeared.

You Get Up and Go to Work: Wayne Thiebaud

Artist friend Frank Bettendorf is always sharing amusing and inspiring bits he finds on the internet with me. He found the above short interview with Wayne Thiebaud (click here if the embeded version doesn't work).

Thiebaud has long been a favorite painter of mine, and not just because he paints a lot of cake! He is a master of rich, shimmering color and seductive and compelling texture in his oil paints. His paintings vibrate with life, but are simplified to the essentials. In the above short interview (about 9 minutes) the 88-year-old Thiebaud shares thoughts on his work ethic as a painter and capturing the "life of light" in his paintings. You really need to watch this video. (Part of the fun is that you will see him at work and you'll see his sketches up on a drawing board adjacent to his painting.)

You'll also want to view an earlier interview with him (when he was 81 years old) where he talks about having a sense of humor. (I found this one for you to look at Frank!)

Both will inspire you to work harder, to think about your painting, and as Thiebaud says, "live on hope, the next picture."

So get busy!

If You Don't Have a Plan—Quit While You're Ahead (sort of)

Above: another small (4 x 4 inches) pencil and watercolor sketch of a bird, this time a rooster. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

I frequently start without a plan, especially when I'm making a sketch that is a glorified color thumbnail. So if you start without a plan at some point you really do need to stop and think where you are going or quit while you are ahead.

Today I posted this small rooster sketch to make this point. I started this sketch because I wanted to work on using pencil and watercolor. I almost always sketch in ink these days, so it is a different thought process for me—what do I want to do with the pencil? The barest of details? A complete grisaille?

I also have been doing a lot of gouache work these days as I get some new paintings ready for an upcoming show. Mentally I have to turn my brain around to work in transparent glazes or in washes.

Binding Books in Batches

Above: Two small (3.5 x 5.25 inch) and one regular (6.75 x 10 inch) Nideggen journals. The first batch of this "round" of binding. (The lighting is off in the photo—that front book's fabric is way more teal! There is metallic gold on the small black book's decorative paper, sort of a wash that settled everywhere in the cold press texture of the 140 lb. watercolor paper used for that design. It's sparkly when you hold it in the light.) Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Saturday morning, while baking bread I was able to get the first three books of this new group finished. But I'm not a happy camper. I want to bind them all at once! I'm having trouble pacing myself. I did three more of the regular journals Sunday morning, again while baking bread. This morning I finished 4 more regular journals (and baked bread after binding so the house wouldn't get hot while I was binding). That leaves 3 more to case in! (Maybe I can get a hang of this small batch thing?)

Minnesota Botanical: Art Show at the Grand Hand Gallery

Left: Lake Superior Rock painting from Roz’s on-going series. Gouache on 300 lb. watercolor paper. 5 x 7 inches. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Join eight Minnesota artists as we celebrate Minnesota Botanical with the garden party opening at the Grand Hand Gallery, Saturday, August 8, 5 to 8 p.m.

The show runs through August 30. It contains work by Roz Stendahl (selections from her Lake Superior Rocks series), Karen Engelbretson, Jo Wood, Joan Lavine, Paul Benson, Kevan Willington, Mary Anne O’Malley, and Mark Granlund. The work ranges from “exquisitely detailed scientific illustrations to artistic interpretations of the beauty of the natural world.”

It’s Minnesota, it’s summer. Mark your calendar. Come and celebrate with the artists. Find that little bit of summer to take home with you for the long, cold winter!

Speaking of Unbound Journals…

Above: One of my journal cards for the MCBA Visual Journal Collective’s Journal Card Exchange Project. This card was on Kathleen's paper, approx. 5 x 7 inches, a printmaking paper of some sort (part of the fun is you might not recognize all the papers you get in). Kathleen's theme was maps of your life (I don't recall the exact wording, but that's how I interpreted it.) I created a walking route map to my favorite neighborhood restaurant with some collage items, and some rubberstamping (a drawing I did of a fortune cookie which was made into a rubber stamp). Click on the image to view an enlargement.

Yesterday’s post on unbound journals left off one key advantage to this method of journaling: easy collaborative projects. That’s right, if you work on journal cards it’s easy to swap your work with other journal artists.

Journaling Superstitions #9: You Must Journal in a Bound Volume

Above: Roz’s Minnesota 2005 State Fair Journal. A portfolio was made at the end of the fair when the thickness of the 7 inch square cards was known. Photo by Tom Nelson. Click on the image to view an enlargement.

To say a journal has to be in a bound volume is to ignore the variety of ways in which people think and create. The reader of a journal might selfishly want everyone to keep a journal in a bound volume so that a journal can easily be paged through, but keeping a journal isn’t about the comfort and convenience of the reader, it’s about the comfort, growth, and output of the artist keeping the journal.

Bookcoverings

Above: the Japanese bookcloth and decorative papers for the current batch of books, which will have Nideggen paper for pages.

I mentioned on Facebook that I was painting decorative paper and several friends asked for photos. Typically I don't post photos until everything is made up in book form, but I got to thinking people might enjoy seeing everything all cut up. I couldn't get high enough over the table to really include everything however: top left—it is difficult to see the gold and light green fabrics that will go with some magenta (yes magenta!) paper; top right— you can't see the lovely orange and cobalt blue mixes on the paper that will go with red and navy fabrics. This go around I actually made some decorative papers that went well with the smoky lavender bookcloth I bought by mistake months ago and haven't found a use for yet (four books will use this subtle color this round).

Summer Reading

Left: Cover of the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.

Summer reading—I read all year long, but I still notice a difference in what I read during the summer. I think this is a hold over from grade school when suddenly there was no more homework and the only limit on my reading was how many books I could carry home on my bicycle.

Several years ago I fell in love with Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeus Trilogy. I'd like to recommend it to you for summer reading if you haven't made selections yet. I found the series to be much better written than the Harry Potter series (which I enjoyed, but I found the writing clunky).