Florida

Right There, an artist’s book

Thirty years of Florida living did not dim the memory of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Actually when I was a kid it was just plain Sleeping Bear Dunes, complete with Dune Rides in great big American Car dune buggies. A residency at Glen Arbor Art Association in 2005 gave me an opportunity to visit the area and recreate the the park and my childhood memories in  this book. “Right There” was the Florida Artist Book Prize winner in 2006 and is now part of the collection at the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book.

Colophon

This book is a tour through time and space, bouncing around the artist’s head, Glen Arbor/ Glen Haven, Michigan, and the early 1960’s. Much of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore has remained unchanged. Memories however may have become better with the passage of time. The book’s covers are basswood, planed, sanded and tied together with leather thongs. The cover art is laser etched into the wood, front and back covers of each chapter. The papers used are Thai Unryu and Arches Cold Press Watercolor 300 and 140 lbs. The book was created in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Pagemaker 7.0. The font used is Americana. “Right There” has seven chapters, and when closed creates a block approximately 10 inches wide, 12.5 inches tall, and 10 inches deep. A custom denim bag is included for transportation. Each chapter contains one woodcut print, one C-print, one digital scan, and one essay by the artist. The book is an edition of five. The photographs were taken at a residency at Glen Arbor Art Association/ Sleeping Bear Dunes in summer 2004. The toy images, woodcut prints, and book itself were produced in 2006. The essays are semi-accurate memories of the artist’s childhood growing up in Michigan during the 1960’s.

Can’t See It From My House, an artist’s book

Can’t See It From My House     artist’s book/ title page    9” x 12” x .5”        2008

Can’t See It From My House was created from woodcut prints, photographs, and other ephemera gathered between 2005-2007 in Miami and Coconut Grove, Florida. It is a story of one neighborhood being replaced by another, although it is far from being a completed story. The story will continue to be told by the City of Miami for years to come.
The cover is blind embossed Murillo, with Foldovers and Tackets. Paste papers front and back are real estate listings, laminated in Mulberry paper, as are the end sheets. The book block consist of seven folded sheets, twelve by eighteen inches, of Hannemuhle German Etching paper. It is sewn together with a kettle stitch and bound to the cover with a Complex Multi Quire binding.
The images are inkjet photographs, mixed media drawing, and five woodcut prints (reduced and recreated with polymer plates as relief prints with the Vandercook 4 proof letterpress at the Jaffe Center for Book Arts at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca Raton, Florida). Can’t See It From My House is an edition of twenty with five artist’s proofs.