Dracaena Flowers

Heavens! This has nothing to do with paper, books or art, but is so pleasing I just had to mention it. About a day ago my bedroom started to smell as if it were filled with roses. Lots of roses.

Then I noticed sticky gobs of sap by my printer (fortunately, not on the printer). I looked straight up over my head and saw this. It's a Dracaena (commonly known as a corn plant). I've had plants like this for 25 years and never previously had one do this. Its name turns out to be Dracaena fragrans—those lushly-scented flowers, apparently, are a defining feature.

One houseplant website says they rarely bloom indoors. I thought I was mean to it, but it turns out they like low light and forgetful watering. Who knew?

It sits right next to a mother-in-law's tongue that blooms annually. Perhaps this will become a regular occurrence.

One of my mother-in-law's tongues in bloom.

Floating Pictures in Slide Holder

I've been playing around with a translucent microscope slide holder. I glued some pictures of white doves onto slides and stacked them inside. The effect reminds me a bit of a miniature fish tank, with things floating in a little box. Only the semi-opaque character of the plastic adds a certain ghostly mystery.

Living Where I Do...

 Leif Parsons/NY Times illustration

I'm going to be having a show next year at Eureka Books.

It isn't happening for a while yet, but I'm bringing it up now because the bookshop was mentioned in the New York Times on Sunday. The author of the piece, Amy Stewart, is one of the co-owners. It's a true, and funny, story involving the store and Humboldt County's most famous agricultural export. The link probably won't be up for long.

Paper Mosaic Collage Sighting

All Trains Go to King's Cross St Pancras ©2001

The other day I discovered that one of my old Underground paper mosaic collages is being used, with permission, in an interesting online exhibition at the musée historique environnement urbain. 

This link will take you to the beginning of the London section of the virtual exhibit. If you roll your mouse over the pictures and follow the arrow that appears on the right, you'll eventually get to All Trains Go to King's Cross St. Pancras. It's being used to illustrate the tube-like nature of the deep level tunnels. The main site  for the virtual musée (in English or en Français) has links to all kinds of exhibitions on aspects of urban life.

By way of background, the picture was based on a photo that I took several years ago at Manor House Station on the Piccadilly Line. The title comes from the announcement on the electronic sign. They've since "refurbished" the station. I haven't seen the cleaned up version in person, although judging by the glossy, bright pictures, I suspect I wouldn't actually like what they've done.

How an Artist's Book is Not Like a Picture

I've been pondering ways of conveying the progression of time and movement in books. I was recently re-skimming parts of Keith Smith's Structure of the Visual Book. He talks about how the structures of artists' books relate to those in "music, poetry, story-telling and cinema." He then cautions:

Carryover of past concepts is often inappropriate... Revolutionary ideas must be realized when starting to work in a new medium. The basic problem in making books is approaching it as if it were many single pictures, and it is not. 

This error comes from working in one medium, and carrying over principles to a new process, rather than discovering what is unique about the new medium.

As someone who used to work largely in single pictures, this is something that I've found to be both exhilarating and vexing about making artist's books.

I was listening to a talk that Bea Nettles gave at Duke University (thanks to a link posted on the Book Arts List). She mentioned how in one of her books she partly conveyed the slow, subtle process of aging by gradually transforming the background color of the book's pages. As the book progresses and the subject grows older, each page becomes ever so subtly more purple. By the end, the viewer realizes that the pages have become deep purple, hinting at how a person almost imperceptibly ages from day to day, slowly evolving into an older person. Now that's the sort of thing that makes a book unlike a painting.