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Birla power
Tata trucks
Leaf plates stitched
Earth swept
sunlit
barefoot
chili
Saris
goats
monkeys and a pig
Dark skin
between
Thursday
wires
dust
electricity
Two bullocks
a Honda bike
and
bangles
men dressed
in white
Darkness falls
headlights
when
An evening lamp
is lit.
Mitered bamboo picks
stitch leaf plate.
The cow is served dinner.
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Brass
nose rings
earrings
fingers and toes
silver pins in her hair
market day
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Behind the Veteran’s Building 2001
Handmade paper using plant life from Napa, CA. pen and ink, watercolor,
Parchment paper, ink jet print, stamps, raffia, plastic
7 x 5 inches
It’s really easy to make your own paper. All you need is some scraps of paper, a blender from the kitchen and a framed screen. You’ll need some felt to sop up the excess water. After collecting leaves and tiny flowers I made the pulp. Before the new piece of paper was dry I inserted straw for a tie. One day when my husband and I went on a hike, I jotted down some notes along the way. When I made this book I just just left the notes the way they were, made the font really tiny and printed it. The grasses and tiny flowers were collected during the hike. This kind of handmade book is called a single signature book, an Artist’s book.
Portrait
Looking at the names of sketching strokes
in Chinese art, I see the country:
Ancient wavy silk thread
String
Iron wire
Moving cloud and flowing water
Leech
Nail-head, rat-tail
Wedge
Broken reed
Olive
Date pit
Willow leaf
Bamboo leaf
Shaking ripple
Earthworm
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In Morocco, moushrabiyas or geometrical screens
keep Muslim women hidden from view.
These screens allow women to observe
their surroundings without themselves being seen.
This is an Artists’ Book
An Artists’ Book is a work of art. It is not just a vehicle to contain a story and communicate non-visual ideas.
Different media are used in a unique way to create a book-like object.
These books are puzzles.
They are undefined.
The viewer and the artist make up their own story using clues from the book-like structure.
Text, image and structure are equally important in an Artists’ Book.
In The Bay Bridge my cover and spine is the steel box. The pages can be taken out of the box and looked at indvidually.
For a few years we lived in an apartment looking right out at the Oakland- San Francisco Bay Bridge. In a drawer near the window I kept a supply of the same size ’pages’ for my Artists’ Book. I’d record what was going on outside my window. What happens is you have the same size paper for each drawing and painting so you start to think of different ways to fill that piece of paper. The book is chuck full now. Included in the steel box are stories about connections I have had with the bridge.
Fragments, Fadings and Feelings
Mills College Art Museum
When I was in China the abstract beauty of calligraphy intrigued me. I bought some children’s textbooks on how to write Chinese script. For centuries the children have learned how to write by copying characters within boxes in order to understand their structure and proportions.
I started to copy the lessons. Soon my strokes freed themselves from the grid. The “correct” version of the letters was replaced by the “wrong” solution. Using sumi ink, wax and acrylic paint on xuan paper I put down marks. The shapes and colors mixed and spread into new compositions and brushstrokes. The biomorphic forms of nature took over.
As I painted I thought of the world’s largest hydroelectric dam on the Yangtze River. The Three Gorges Dam transformed the river into a deep reservoir flooding farmland, cities, villages and archaeological sites. People were relocated to new structures of mass produced design, buildings with slick, cold, white tile.
Today’s mass production and permanency of materials is replacing an intuitive expression of life. These paintings are made of materials that are vulnerable to the effects of weathering and our touch. The sun will fade some of the brilliant colors into muddy earth tones. Fragile paper will tear. But the way xuan paper transmits light, the way people carried out their everyday life on the Yangtze. These memories will stay in my heart.
When I started making Artists’ Books I thought people have been making books for years and anyway, I’m a painter. What can I do that would be different? I decided to make a big book. Each page is made up of two oil paintings on canvas, stretcher bars included. Metal prongs hold them together. What is Intuitive Collisions about? My father was a financier, an industrialist and I was an artist. Our minds couldn’t have been farther apart. We ended up taking early morning walks together. He would talk to me about building a bridge or how the stock market was doing. I would be looking at how the fog masked out the vineyard leaving only the trees to see. By the end of the walk, we’d be happy to have spent some time with each other. I think we understood each other a little bit better, too.
Intuitive Collisions 1999
Oil, transfers, acrylic on canvas, stretcher bars, wood joiners,
prong type glides, metal hinges
14″ x 29″ x 9″ 58 inches open book
