ELSEWHERE

Lunch is served

Lunch is ready! Served at last. My new zine on orange stock is now a folded, editioned and finished zine. All complete, all done, and ready and waiting in our online store.

Lunch
an edition of 100
available here

It will be just one of many zines super new and slightly less so that we will be bringing with us to the Sticky annual zine fair.









(Nipping at the heels of these birds, a new postcard travels zine is one the way. Excitement is always afoot around here. Hooray!)

Focusing on the physical and the material

Sometime late last year, the first issue of Materiality was published. You can now purchase it as a hard copy or as a PDF download through Pinknantucket Press. Puruse the table of contents and be tempted. There is even a zine tucked inside the back cover which certainly adds to its allure.

MATERIALITY
Number 1: Book
Published by Pinknantucket Press
Edited by Alice Cannon
2012

The Artist and the Book

Book artists Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison love paper for its adaptable, foldable, concealable, revealing nature. From their limited edition artists' books to prints, zines, postcards and other projects, the animal is ever-present in their work. "For us, the animal is there to question our very behaviour, those moral principles by which one governs the self, and to explore our relationship with the natural world... we leave our scenes deliberately open-ended. We invite you to ponder, to contemplate, and to perhaps find that things are not as they appear at first glance." Gracia Haby tells us more about their attraction to the book format as an artistic medium.

I blame the intimacy of the book. It was perhaps a suggestive wink from a book that first drew me to collage and from there to the process of altering and adding to the printed page. Now, I am not referring to those precious tomes that in library collections most rare reside. Nor am I talking of books deemed sacred by any definition. No, I am talking of books salvaged from dusty piles and rescued from opportunity shops. Book that can be exchanged for a couple of plastic notes of various colours that would otherwise become a meal for silverfish and time. So, before you panic about the corruption of a precious book, remember that the future of these books, these beautiful books, was not always secure. They come with age spots and creases and weak spines. They are hunched. There, I've made them human, almost. Like withered folk in a nursing home. Well, perhaps not—I may have inflated my position as Rescuer Supreme a tad too much, like any real collector who saves artefacts from the clutches of the past and then feels inside the warm victorious glow.

Now, where were we? Books—one's love affair with books. Books ripe for collage. I've one favourite supplier who keeps any tremors of withdrawal at bay. If it sounds like an obsession, then, yes, you'd be right. Collecting can often become an obsession, a devotion sometimes taken a little too far. Obsession is perhaps what steers the ship Louise and I jointly captain across the paper seas. We are linked by a love of paper, be it to draw or paint upon, to fold into concertinas, or to snip at with a pair of scissors until the negative space (typically) is no more and new landscapes are found.

In my search for a suitable book, I am first restricted by the price listed inside the cover. Restrictions and limitations can actually work to the advantage. In a general sense, I look for books that are not so badly damaged that they cannot be used, ones that are chiefly complete. I am not bothered by a rusty staple in a tourist booklet, for this I know can be removed and a stitch tied in its place. I am not adverse to age spots or even marks left from sticky tape.

I look for negative space within the images printed on the page. Primarily, is there enough of it? Or will any hippo or vulture or river otter be too restricted or hampered (even for my liking) by the composition's predetermined confines? Within the existing image on the page, I look for room to add something to the scene. And I look for books that hold scenes that are not, by my definition, too complete and beautiful that no further mark or element is needed. I look for books that feature the landscape or the urban environment prominently. I like to control the scene as a puppeteer controls their puppets and a choreographer their dancers on the stage. I view the scene from such a distance. I look for many images within each book, for this is the arena I doctor with glue pot and brush and elements cut from another book at some earlier stage.

Upon a more practical note, I look for a paper that will agree with glue. Something that is not too thin, for those, when a collage piece is adhered, will ripple in quiet rebellion. I look also for a matte finish, as I will draw on the page with pencil. I use pencil around the edge of the collaged pieces, to soften any white edges that a slightly thicker paper will yield when placed atop another, and to shade, for example, the hind paw of an animal. Shading helps me to marry the piece added to the base below. Seamlessness, that is the aim. I am interested in creating a sleight-of-hand, a fascination that Louise and I carry over into our collaborative collages too. We try, always, to hide the effort of the hand. And, compositionally, we desire the piece to look both effortlessly thrown together and as if it had always been that way. It is all about finding a balance, and working a restriction to an advantage.

A ready supply of books languishing in small darkened stores and a love of a format that requires the viewer to curl around or cradle it—or, if displayed in a case, requires the neck to crane forward and perhaps the nose to hit the glass—this is what draws me to the book and to collage. Printed paper—I am, on second thought, not your master but your slave most willing.

Rüppell’s Vulture

The last drawing from my Lunch zine, a Rüppell’s Vulture (Gyps rueppelli). One of the iconic scavengers of the African plains, from Senegal east to Sudan and Tanzania, a Rüppell’s vulture flies so high in roaming for food that its blood is specially adapted to capture oxygen in the thin air. This vulture patrols dry mountainous terrain, leaving its cliff-top roost sites in early morning to rise on updraughts instead of thermals. It uses acute vision to find carcasses and will wait patiently — days, if necessary — for predators to leave a kill. Like most vultures, it eats soft, rotting flesh and offal. However, its long neck means it can reach deeper into corpses than many of its competitors — gorging its fill until, with some difficulty, it returns to the skies.

As well as through our online store, my new Lunch zine of these incredible birds will be at Sticky's forthcoming annual zine fair.

A golden charm

At last! We've recently added to our online store, a number of golden paper finches, as promised. Some of those that were previously in the window of Milly Sleeping (as part of Hidden Gems & Rough Diamonds) are now looking to fly to new homes.

Sold individually, from a charm of 100, you can purchase one or more here. Each double-sided finch comes secured with a length of golden thread to enable easy suspension.

And, in addition to Lunch, my new birds of prey zine I've recently been sharing with you, here's a look at another forthcoming zine, Beneath the screen of closed eyelids (Port Said).







(Time for NEW image size! I spreading my wings to 500 pixels in the column width.)

Secretarybird

Secretarybird (Sagittarius serpentarius) is one of the few raptors to hunt on ground, this long-legged bird of the African savannah chases small animals, often stamping to disable them once caught. Quite magnificent, nature.

Now only one more bird to show from my Lunch zine. What could have a larger wingspan than this 2.1m beauty?

Black-breasted Snake Eagle

A Black-breasted Snake Eagle (Cirartus pectoralis) makes for a fine third portrait in my Lunch zine. A bird of the African grasslands, this eagle feeds on lizards and small mammals as well as snakes.

Lunch will soon be available for purchase. For those of you curious, here, thanks to instagram, is a look at it thus far, wrapped in plastic. I'm excited to add an orange zine to this growing series. I am slowly working my way through the colour spectrum.

Grey
Lavender
Pale Blue
Aqua
Peppermint Green
Hot Pink
Yellow
Bright Yellow
Pale Yellow
Sand

Peregrine Falcon

This Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) is the second bird of prey to appear in my Lunch zine. As the fastest bird of prey, this falcon dives steeply on prey in mid-air. It is found throughout the world in open country, including tundra and semi-desert.

Familiar?

(On another note, a charm of golden finches is soon to land in our online store.)

American Kestrel

I have this very day finished drawing a series of birds for a new zine. It is entitled Lunch and features five birds of prey. The first to share with you is this American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). Kestrels are small falcons that habitually hover when hunting. This species is distributed throughout the Americas, including the Caribbean Islands.

The other four birds will hover here soon, looking for their lunch. I think for fun I shall list them in order of smallest to largest wingspan.

The zine will go to print in the coming days, and be ready for all soon. With any luck by lunchtime next Friday.

At sea

In The Big Issue's summer edition, Gracia and I have two collages. We've yet to buy a couple of printed copies from a vendor, but hope to tomorrow. Above is a look at the collages they went with to illustrate the story All at Sea by Laura Jean McKay, and below, several of the other works we created so that they were spoilt for choice.

This is the fourth time we have created a collage especially for The Big Issue. Each time has been a joy. (Previously (1), (2), (3))













It came out on Boxing Day so you've only a couple more days to get a copy of summer reads with the Hobbit on the cover. Be quick!

I thought you'd like this behind-the-scenes taster. You may recall G's posts on other collages created for The Big Issue, From idea to publication (I) and From idea to publication (II) from around this time last year.

And now I really must get back to sleuthing. (Three episodes of the third and final series of Forbrydelsen down.)

Outdoors

Following on from Gracia's recent post of instagram memories from Christmas day to the morning of New Year's Eve, here is a bright handful of New Year's memories up to New Year's Day with a sleeping Omar and Percy. I am hoping that 2013 brings with it good things and plenty of time to curl up with a book.

Here, before I go, is a quote I liked about the summer in Through the Woods by H.E. Bates (published by Little Toller Books):

"Tea would be laid on summer afternoons on the long table in the back room, the windows open on to the garden, and the smell of thyme would come in and mingle itself with the smell of tea and seed cake and butter and that eternal soft beery smell that nothing could drive away."
(From the chapter, The Height of Summer, page 82.)

It seems a good fit with the images above.

Wishing you a happy year ahead. Happy summer! I am now going to return to painting more little cyclists yellow and gold with the last of the light.