Boxes, books and other paper arts
A hand-built and decorated box holds rubbings from Penland’s grounds.
Despite spending many summers at art colonies or crafts schools in remote wooded locations, I never got much inspiration from nature in doing my art. All the green just did not do much for me.
Then one summer I signed up for a bookmaking class at Penland, taught by Julie Leonard, a book artist with the University of Iowa.I decided to tackle a complex construction project, designing a box inspired by one sent out by a stock photo company. The box used heavy black card stock imprinted with a primitive icon pattern, and a phrase hand-written in gold pen: “We feel a great rush of wind, as though all the locked doors and windows within have been thrown open and body and spirit can fully breathe again.” [The phrase is from Michael Ventura’s article in Psychology Today about love blossoming among the elderly.] Given the reference to nature, and to a sense of opening up to unseen or locked up emotions, I decided to somehow incorporate content that might not be visible to the casual onlooker.
I wandered the grounds, heavy tracing paper in hand, and took charcoal rubbings of many of the surfaces on the grounds of the school, including “environmental art” pieces created by students in previous summers. Inside the box, red fabric and a pull tab housed the rubbings.
Tags: bookmaking, Penland School of Crafts, printmaking, rubbings
October 25th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
[...] Boxes, books and other paper arts Despite spending many summers at art colonies or crafts schools in remote wooded locations, I never got much inspiration from nature in doing my art. All the green just did not do much for me. … [...]