the cassandra pages

A little gift...

I'm having a sale at Phoenicia, in honor of spring and National Poetry Month. A couple of days ago I made some new hand-printed bookplates, and will be giving one away to each of the first five people to place a direct order.

All the full-length books are on sale, including Annunciation and How Many Roads?

Bookplates and prints are also for sale in the new Store on the website. Hope you'll take a look.

You know, I feel so fortunate to be able to work with the authors and artists whose work we have published. I wish I could bring out more books each year but it's just too difficult - this is basically a one person operation, with some generous help in certain areas from my partner, and it's time-consuming and costly, while being extremely rewarding from all other points of view. I know a lot of you have supported this endeavor over the years and this is a chance to say, again, thank you - both from me and from the authors themselves.

I love what Dave Bonta wrote on Facebook when he shared the announcement: "These are all good. Some are down-right great. (I know because I have read all of them.)" That's about the most straight-forward recommendation I can imagine!

Happy Easter

et Joyeuses Pâques!

John Donne, Annunciation and Passion

"Departing Wings." Linocut by Elizabeth Adams from Annunciation, Phoenicia Publishing 2015

It's rare for the Feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday to occur on the same day. In the 21st century this only happened in 2005 and 2016 and won't occur again for a century. When this happens, the Church usually separates the observances; the nnunciation will be celebrated later in April. However, John Donne pondered the convergence of these events in 1608, as I did yesterday during the long, solemn services, my awareness of the Annunciation and of Mary herself - young naive girl, and sorrowing mother - having been sharpened this year by the book project I completed in December.  I always find it easier to read Donne's poetry out loud, and enjoyed doing that with this extraordinary poem that I had never read before, sent to me yesterday by a friend on Instagram.

Upon the Annunciation and
Passion Falling upon One Day.
John Donne, 1608

Tamely, frail body, abstain today; today
My soul eats twice, Christ hither and away.
She sees Him man, so like God made in this,
That of them both a circle emblem is,
Whose first and last concur; this doubtful day
Of feast or fast, Christ came and went away;
She sees Him nothing twice at once, who’s all;
She sees a Cedar plant itself and fall,
Her Maker put to making, and the head
Of life at once not yet alive yet dead;
She sees at once the virgin mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha;
Sad and rejoiced she’s seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty and at scarce fifteen;
At once a Son is promised her, and gone;
Gabriel gives Christ to her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, she’s in orbity,
At once receiver and the legacy;
All this, and all between, this day hath shown,
The abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plain maps, the furthest west is east)
Of the Angels’ Ave and Consummatum est.
How well the Church, God’s court of faculties,
Deals in some times and seldom joining these!
As by the self-fixed Pole we never do
Direct our course, but the next star thereto,
Which shows where the other is and which we say
(Because it strays not far) doth never stray,
So God by His Church, nearest to Him, we know
And stand firm, if we by her motion go;
His Spirit, as His fiery pillar doth
Lead, and His Church, as cloud, to one end both.
This Church, by letting these days join, hath shown
Death and conception in mankind is one:
Or ‘twas in Him the same humility
That He would be a man and leave to be:
Or as creation He had made, as God,
With the last judgment but one period,
His imitating Spouse would join in one
Manhood’s extremes: He shall come, He is gone:
Or as though the least of His pains, deeds, or words,
Would busy a life, she all this day affords;
This treasure then, in gross, my soul uplay,
And in my life retail it every day.

--

 

Multiple-Color Printing

There are several methods for making multiple-color relief prints, and in every case, the tricky part is the registration of the colors. In a reduction print, the same block is used throughout. You print a number of copies of the first color, then carve away a bit more, print another color, and so forth. By the end, of course, the block cannot be used to print another edition because most of it has been carved away. But the registration issues only involve placing the paper in exactly the same place every time.

When printing from multiple blocks, both the paper and the different blocks have to be in register for every copy. But nothing is destroyed in the process; you can print editions with different colorways, start over, add additional colors by making another block. I've made a few two-color prints, but this was the first time I tried three. Above are proof prints of each of the colors that will be combined onto one sheet of paper in the final print. Below, the blocks used to create them.

One block, called the key block, contains the most helpful information for keeping everything in one place - in this case, that's the black one, with the most complex detail. The other blocks are based on it and have to be created in perfect register. This is not particularly easy, because of the amount of handwork involved in tracing a mirror image onto a substrate that's going to be carved by hand.The blocks have to be exactly the same size, and held by some sort of system - I used a jig that I made out of matboard, mounted securely on a slightly sticky mat of a vinyl material used to line shelves. There also has to be a method for placing the paper in the same place for each color impression: I used finely-ruled lines on the edges of the matboard; for a larger print I would use a pin-registration system similar to that used by offset printers in the days before digital pre-press.

Below, the blue block and red block have been printed. The black lines of the key block will cover the gaps that you can see in the image, for example around the upper hand, and the triangular motif of the gown below the neck. (For the final edition, I mixed a slate-blue color rather than the brighter blue shown here.)

I'm just learning about the technical problems involved, but I have to admit, it's the kind of challenge I like - and it fits pretty well with my early days as a graphic designer, when we cut masks out of rubylith and had to figure out the registration of multiple-color jobs ourselves, setting them up manually. And it's OK with me not to have an absolutely perfect result - part of the unique beauty of a hand-pulled print is that it is just that: handmade. We're so used to computers making everything perfect. This is an ancient process, and I like it for exactly that reason.

 

From the Studio this Week

Olive. I'm experimenting with multiple-color relief prints...more on that in a day or two...and papers other than my usual Japanese rice papers. This is on lightweight Rives BFK, printed by hand: paper which is just substantial enough to be used as a card.

 

And it's been back to drawing. You've probably seen many of these objects here before! I like the relative speed and looseness of this fountain pen sketch.

 

And an ink and watercolor wash drawing of some broccoli rabe on a blue ceramic dish, done last night while dinner was in the oven. It feels good to be drawing again after a long break over the holidays.

 

 

 

Small Packages: making the "occasional" illustrations for Annunciation

Every book project presents unique design challenges. As the poems began to arrive for Annunciation, I quickly realized that a major issue would be finding the right balance of illustrations to poems. The project had begun with a large, almost-square image, and I planned to do others in a similar format, each taking up a page on its own.

These new images developed as I read and thought about the poems: the one above arose because several of the poets referred to Renaissance paintings that depict Mary reading a book.

Once I had completed half a dozen prints and laid them out with the poems on the pages, spacing them out through the book, this number seemed about right: the six large, full-page relief prints were graphic, with strong solid black areas. They needed to contrast with the more delicate typography and generous white space on the facing pages, but not overpower the words.

An early "test" layout, above -- this image ended up paired with a different poem.

But there were further considerations. Some poets would be represented by a single poem, others by as many as four, and the poems were of varying lengths, but every author had taken the project seriously and put their minds and hearts into it. It was very important to me for each poet to have some art on their pages. It was already September, and I was running out of time: I couldn't complete sixteen full-page illustrations, one for each poet, and I felt that would be too many pages of art in any case.  I had already done a few smaller illustrations. It seemed to me that these  "occasional" or "spot" illustrations would augment the text, extend the art onto more pages, and complement the words and their meaning.

The first small illustrations I had created were fairly realistic and representational, like this white rose:

 

But as the project progressed, the illustrations had becoming more graphic and abstract, and this direction pleased me. Now I wondered what motifs would lend themselves to the subject, but also allow some abstraction? Leaves? Berries?

These blocks yielded illustrations in several sizes, and by scanning the prints I was able to flip them horizontally and vertically, or to rotate and scale them to extend their usefulness. 

Then I thought of olives, and their long, thin leaves. I played around with that subject, doing a minimum of preliminary drawing, and just carving freely. I had liked the "dotty" areas in the previous attempts, and went for that more intentionally:

 

One of these olive images became the basis for the book's endpapers, a crash design effort that was necessary for a last-minute technical reason.

Those endpapers ended up being one of my favorite parts of the whole design -- I'll talk about that in another post.

(I'm giving away an original 8"x8" print (at left) to one of the Annunciation buyers, chosen at random: if you'd like to enter, please put your name in the "December Giveaway" box on the order form. If you've already bought a book, you will be automatically entered. Here's the link for more information on the book and ordering.)

A new book from Phoenicia!

Poetry by
Ivy Alvarez,  Rachel Barenblat, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Chana Bloch, Leila Chatti, Luisa A. Igloria, Mohja Kahf, Vivian Lewin, Vinicius de Moraes (Natalie d'Arbeloff, trans.), Roderick Robinson, Nic Sebastian, Claudia Serea, Purvi Shah, Rosemary Starace, and Marly Youmans

Illustrated and Edited by
Elizabeth Adams

Over at Phoenicia, we're excited to announce that Annunciation is now available for pre-order (at a special price through November 20), and that books will be shipping toward the end of November, in time for the holidays. The website also contains  process notes written by the contributors, and they are pretty fascinating.

For me, it's the first time I've illustrated a book with linocuts, and represents the culmination of nearly a year of thought and artwork (see the links below), as well as the editing challenge of inviting and working with many talented poets on a single project.

Many of the poets will be familiar to readers of this blog; I got to know some of them back during the qarrtsiluni days. Others are new acquaintances who I'm very happy to know, and feel privileged to publish. Because part of my incentive for the book was to look at Mary from an interfaith, as well as secular, perspective, the poets are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and secular, and they've brought an amazing breadth to this volume. I am moved by the way in which each poet has managed to identify with Mary, and express some personal point of connection with clarity, emotion, and immediacy. It could have turned out to be a "religious" book but it's much bigger than that -- it's a human book.

So please take a look - I hope some of you will take advantage of the special price. (The pre-orders really help me to gauge how many books to print, too.) Thanks very much for your encouragement during the year as some of the illustrations unfolded here. I hope you'll like the result; it's been a labor of love for all of us and something I think we can all be proud of creating.

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Around the World Blog Hop

Gabriel's Lily

Gabriel's Lily

The new project here at Phoenicia is Annunciation, an illustrated book of poems by a diverse group of contemporary women. The project began in my mind after I did this relief print, back in December of 2014. About 15 poets who I've invited will be contributing poems; I'll be designing the book and producing a set of relief-print illustrations to go with the texts.

This week I finally got going on the new prints, and thought you might like to see the first one in process. This is "Gabriel's Lily." It started out with the pencil drawing, above, to which I added a hand grasping the stem.

The translation from pencil drawing to a block print is worked out in pen and ink; I usually end up with a pile of drawings and worked-over photocopies. Once the idea is fairly set, I reverse the drawing and transfer it to the linoleum, and ink it to minimize mistakes in cutting.

Starting to carve. I use the drawing as a guide, but the vigor and expressive energy in a print comes through the cutting itself: I have to trust myself to add that intangible element through my hands, and a certain amount of freedom and letting-go. This is something I hope I'm getting better at as I gain experience in the medium.

This is the back side of a print as it starts to emerge. I'm using a new ink, Akua, that cleans up with soap and water and doesn't have any odor, so I had to do a lot of experimenting to find the right consistency and thickness on several different Japanese papers. It's pretty different from my usual oil-based ink, but I came to like it.

The block went through several revisions too, until it arrived at this state. That's the scariest part: I wanted to simplify parts of the design, but knew if I went too far, I'd wreck it. Here's my table with the rolled-out ink and baren, the block, and a finished print. What you don't see is me saying "whew!"

A bunch of prints hung up to dry.

And the artist's proof. The book will be coming out in late fall, 2015, and I'll be sharing more of the process as it comes together. It's possible that this particular print won't even make the final cut; what was important was to get started. I'm thrilled about the poems I've received so far, and inspired by them: so many different interpretations and responses to this story, by excellent poets of different faiths and backgrounds. All the texts will be submitted by July 1, and then it's up to me to finish the work of making it all into a book.

It also makes me so happy to see how the collaborative publishing efforts that began with the Ecotone Wiki and carried on into the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni, co-managed for years by Dave Bonta and me, continue to spawn new projects and new relationships. Dave has just started a really cool new project that I'll tell you about in another post, and most of the poets who are working on Annunciation are people I met through qarrtsiluni or other online venues. I sometimes forget to stop and trace the lineage of those relationships back, since all this has happened over just one decade, but it strikes me as a sort of rapid evolutionary process, where creativity and human relationships have partnered with advances in technology and communication, changing all of our lives and probably our brains as well.

Around the World Blog Hop

Laura Frankstone, whose beautiful drawings and paintings I've admired for a long time, has invited me to participate in an around-the-world blog hop of creative artists. The rules are simple: answer the four questions, and then nominate another artist to follow you. So here goes!

1) What am I working on?

Right now I'm working on two book projects. One is a poetry book that my press, Phoenicia Publishing, will publish in March - it's a "dictionary" of poetic aphorisms and epigrams by Magda Kapa, a Greek writer now living in Germany. Each entry, containing a noun and a definition, or a poetic "comment" - is no longer than 140 characters, and they were originally published as tweets over the course of a year. I felt that the design needed to be different from a regular book to best reflect its content. Magda said that she thinks of the project as a Heraclitian river - a river that is always changing; one can never step into this same river twice. So in my design I've tried to do the same thing. (The cover is described at the end of the previous post on this blog.)

The second project is a much more complex one: a book that will come out at the end of 2015. It will be an anthology of poems about Mary and the Annunciation, and I've invited fifteen women poets from widely varying cultural and religious backgrounds to contribute work. I'll be illustrating the book with original relief prints like the one above (that's a detail; the process of making the full print is shown here), editing and designing the text, and maybe printing and binding a special edition - we'll see! I'm very excited about this project because it is going to push me as an illustrator, printmaker, and book-artist, and force me to learn some new skills, and at the same time I love the collaboration with the poets, some of whom are longtime friends and acquaintances, and some who I'm just getting to know.

Last year I kept a sketchbook and tried to draw almost every day - so I'm hoping to keep that practice up this year too. And I work on personal paintings or prints whenever the urge strikes.

Lupine - a drawing from my sketchbook.

Daylily and Lupine, acrylic on paper.

2) How does my work differ from others of my genre?

It's never been useful for me to think about my work in comparison to others, except so far as I am inspired, challenged, and encouraged by the work they do. I don't know how my work is different - it is simply my work, and I try very hard to be true to my own path, to listen to my intuition as well as my intellect, and to see each project as a stepping stone to the next. I will say that, as someone who started out doing traditional realistic work, it's been a challenge to find my own style(s) and express myself in a way that is uniquely mine. The process of searching and going deeper always continues, and it's very personal.

Handbound book with suede spine and handpainted/handprinted cover papers, 2013.

3) Why do I create what I do?

Again, that's hard to answer! When I look back over my life - I'm 62 now - I can see the threads running through it, but it's much harder to speak about the present, let alone the future. I'm someone who plans, but I also trust intuition and "the muse," and the way one thing often leads to another if you work hard, think hard, then let go and open yourself up, and really give yourself to it. I have a liberal arts education and am almost completely self-taught in art and design. My career has been in graphic design; I've loved the book arts since I was a child, but I'm also a painter who works in many mediums and who loves drawing. I'm doing less commercial design work than I used to, but now I have this publishing venture that is leading me ever further into collaborations with other artists, photographers, and writers. I want to push "the book" farther, using both technology and traditional methods and materials, but I also want to use the time and freedom I have now to do the best art and writing that I can. Having said that, at the base of everything, I'm always inspired by nature and the beauty and mystery of human beings.

The studio with some large charcoal drawings of Iceland, a print of Montmorency Falls in Quebec, and two smaller paintings for a friend in New Zealand.

4) How does my creating process work?

If we're talking about a complex project, usually an idea presents itself - often as an outgrowth of something else - and I think about it for a few days, to allow the initial excitement to settle down and some questions about feasibility to surface. I listen hard to my intuition, and if it tells me to proceed, then I go for it wholeheartedly. If there are doubts, I either wait or move on. The actual process depends on the end product: if I'm making a print, I always begin with a series of drawings, but my large drawings are usually done directly. Designing a book is a complex, picky, and often technical process that takes place mostly on the computer; it may include hand artwork, photography, calligraphy or drawn type, image processing, scanning, and several different software programs.

Two persimmons.

But in terms of spontaneous work, if I'm inspired by something I see or feel, I try to capture that quickly by sketching or painting something expressively. I've found that the practice of drawing a little, everyday, makes it much easier to work on bigger things when inspiration strikes. When I was sixteen, I took a summer art course where we had to paint for three hours every single morning - that was very good for me, and showed me that you can work in spite of difficulties, lethargy, different moods and physical states. I've always been pretty disciplined, and I'm grateful that since moving to Montreal I've had - for the first time in my life - a large studio with excellent light in which to work. The rest is up to me, and the first step is to show up every single day.

--

Thank you, Laura, for inviting me to participate here! And now I'm going to pass the baton across the Atlantic, to my dear friend and artist extraordinaire, Natalie d'Arbeloff, in London.

A new relief print

I've wanted to attempt an "Annunciation" for some time, and have been working on a version for a relief print for quite a while. Several years ago I looked at a number of artists' interpretations as I was thinking about it, and my eventual version is loosely based on the Cortona Annunciation by Fra Angelico, painted in 1433-34.

I thought you might be interested in seeing some of the stages in the process.

Here's my original drawing from the painting, done back in 2012.

I got this far before getting discouraged and unsure how to take it further, and put the drawings away in a drawer.

In December of this year, I found the drawings and started working on them again. The figures had already been considerably simplified and moved. I eliminated Gabriel's halo, gave Mary a big one, and put her on a bench, below him. Mary's submissive acceptance has always been presented as a model of faith and behavior for women. However I very much doubt if a young unmarried girl of the time would have reacted to a message like this, delivered by a male angel appearing without warning, except with fear and great ambivalence: qualities that have rarely been depicted in artistic interpretations. I wanted to try to emphasize that in the gestures, the relationship of the figures, and in their expressions. On the other hand, because of the crudity of the relief-print process, it's difficult to show subtlety in faces, so whatever I did would have to be stylized.

I also worked a lot on adding some detail to the feathers, the angel's gown, and especially to Mary's dress, which is inspired here by traditional Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery.

The image had to be flipped, right-to-left, and I worked on ways to include a graphic background behind the figures that would help unify the composition. Somewhere around here I decided to allow the figures to appear in front of the final frame in two places on the right and left. At this point I also had to decide on a final size: the block is about 8" (22 cm) square.

Finally it was time to transfer the drawing to the linoleum and cut the block. The transfer was difficult because of the details, and the cutting took several days. I worked only an hour or two at a time, because my hand, neck and shoulder get tired, increasing the danger of a mistake, a slip that could ruin the block, or of cutting myself. I had wanted to leave myself plenty of latitude for the more serendipitous aspects of block-carving too: the particular quality of a carved line can't be duplicated in drawing, only anticipated. Also, I'm never sure how many "extra" lines I'm going to leave in the mostly-blank areas, following the forms and adding to the sculptural aspect of the final image. The final appearance of the angel's skirt was created almost entirely during the carving process itself; so were the feathers and the angel's coiffure.

And here's the final print. I'm contemplating a two-color version, but for now, I'm happy to see this one come into being. A lot was learned, and I'm glad I stuck with it even though there were struggles along the way.

(There's an edition of 20, available in my shop.)