catch up ..... three of my 52 books

23/52 'deep landscape - an inner journey'

and

24/52 'landscape scars'

I really enjoyed making these two books and in fact, once the project is over, these two books will probably be fixed open and framed.  Steve claimed the darker one and I am partial to the lighter version, so happily they will be visible upon our walls at some stage.  I very rarely do this as I am such a lover of the artist's book in its own right.  However, every now and then I like to think of the books fully revealed and visible.  I have been meaning to frame one of my magpie books as well so may do that at the same time.

The pages for both these books were made from left overs of the landscapes series I did for the exhibition at the Noosa Regional Art Gallery.  They are rich with texture and yet the colours and markings are very subtle.  The inspiration for this body of work came from flying over Lake Ayer after the wind had whipped up all the salt and it look almost like a coastal landscape.  I have also flown in helicopters over other parts of the Australian outback and those visual images of our land from an aerial perspective are my favourite.  The land is flattened and distinguishing features of the landscape often become mere marks on a flat plane.

 25/52 'longlines'

This book is incomplete but of all  the books made  thus far this year, this one has fed my imagination and so I see this as a mock up of various ideas which I wish to explore at some other time.  I will explore the idea of ancestry and various branches and endings, intertwinings and overlaps.  In fact I am contemplating make my first digital artist's book with this idea and will post on it should I ever bring my idea into reality.

wordless wednesday .....

fragments of a life ....

Another of my artist's books - titled 'fragments of a life'.  This book is made up of ten acrylic paintings that I did in a series - another story.  The concept behind this volume is that our lives leave their mark, their trace marks on the landscape and from above, it is likely to see these as patterns floating across the Terra Firma sometimes with ephemeral brushes and at others with heavy gouges and imprints.  However the mark is made it is inevitable that our tracemarks are left behind.

The book is large - 51cms x 37cms, double mounted and embossed, bound in perspex and then protected in another perspex slip cover.  It is incredibly hard to photograph (as an amateur) and show how tactile this book is.  It is one of my favourites though, probably because I enjoyed the painting.  The first few photos more accurately give the sense of the book though not much of it is revealed.  You can see the lovely papers and soft edges. The paintings actually look better with the double mounting though in the detail photos only the back mounting is seen.

These are some of the ten paintings, not all.  In many of them you will see echoes of doorways and I have reinforced these with embossings.  These doors represent different choices we make and take along life's journey. It is actually not a symbol I use very often.

There is an image above which is my favourite and reminds me in many ways of Chagall's painting 'The Bride' and the quote from the film Nottinghill, that 'Happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat'!  See if you can work out which one it is.