And books hold. Books hold words. Traditionally, they held a history as they preserved sacred teachings, ideas and stories of past cultures and practices.
I don’t remember when I first touched a book. They’ve always been around. I do remember the stories and poems my mother read to me, to my brothers, and my twin sister when we were children. I remember how the words came alive as she read them in animated and playful ways. They became more than the flat two-dimensional shapes and lines on a page of a book. I felt them bounce in my head and throughout my body.
Books changed when I started school. I learned to read and then was assigned to read them with a specific intent in mind. That continued for years and I lost something in the process. It wasn’t until I made a book with my hands and with words of my choice did I grasp a deeper and multi-layered understanding of the words. And books became more; they became contained spaces that opened and moved through time as the pages turned, creating a rhythm of sorts.
Black and Blank chronicles an art education. I used the page on plans and rules of composition from John Sloan’s book, The Gist of Art, as a focus for the design. Each page represented a rule of composition with hand-lettered text arranged to function as an image.
I think of the accordion fold as a transitional book form because it can be read in different ways—like a book as a space with the temporal quality of turning the pages and also like a sculpture as object with angles for viewing.
Thoughts on Creating chronicles an art education. I reflected on the first line* of chapter 13 from Rudolph Arnheim’s book, Visual Thinking. The words lead me to think about “words” as a medium and “mediums” as ways to visually express words.
*“Thoughts need shape, and shape must be derived from some medium.”