The solstice falls on the full moon again this year. The last time this happened was in 2002, and my husband, photographer Kenneth Cain, took this photograph...
We will walk the labyrinth at 7 o'clock on Tuesday, with votives, but we probably won't need much light, unless it's cloudy....

Creative Bookbinding comes to Amelia Island!

Sheila's Master Class

I was one of the privileged folks in this class of aspiring masters with a Master! Sheila Waters, doyenne of the calligraphic universe, has us live at her home in rural Pennsylvania where we sit and are SCRIBES for a week. On this "calligraphic vacation", we can live, breathe and eat calligraphy...well, we also did some breathing of fall air on long rural walks, and ate some delicious and nutritious food from her ample kitchen (yeah, trader joes!) and the awesome catered dinners....but this just allowed us to do more lettering for longer and longer! Many of us were working on roman variations: built-up versals, roman lower case, italic in endless variation...some focused on design, some guilding, and some of us just tried a little of everything we saw! Sheila has a huge basement studio with endless flat files of treasures, and she gave a daily demo in her areas of expertise: lettering, layout, color, and, in the photo here, her own tricks for laying gold...
Thanks to all who attended the October session for being so generous and for a relaxing but educational week (I have my "movie recommends" for the next year, I'll tell ya!) and those of you who also aspire to be mini-masters, look into this once-in-a-lifetime class!
PLEASE CLICK THE START ARROW TO WATCH THE SLIDE SHOW BELOW!

Ashton's portrait of "Za-Za" at drafting table...

I have posted my fourth book of W.S. Merwin poems to YouTube...whew! I hope I have a small but interested audience for them. To think their creation spans at least twenty years of work! I hope he lives a long and continually fruitful life...
click on the screen below to view in youtube...and please watch my other "shows" of books by one of my favorite poets!

W.S. Merwin - I Love Your Poetry!

There are several poets who have rocked my calligraphic world: W.S. Merwin is one of them. There are several poems of his that I work and rework in different formats: manuscript books, broadsides, even wall poetry! I've recently put several "book tours" up on youtube...hopefully you will get them if you search: W.S. Merwin (Love, the Letterist) The piece above is "Avoiding News by the River" as a broadside; I have also done "For Love of October" many times. I also admire what Merwin had done with his life, as well as being an awesome and prolific poet. May he have a wonderful year as poet laureate!

I'm so pleased to be teaching Kid's Bookmaking again (guess the economy is improving slightly) after a year off! This time a couple of workshops for the North East Florida Library Network in Florida and Gainsville. Librarians love to make things and anything to do with books. They leave with 8 proto-type books that match their handouts, and other great ideas, like pop-ups cards and christmas ornaments, squeezed in. I hope they get some great ideas to get their kids making books and writing their own stories this summer...

Two pieces in the 2010 Exploration show in Chicago this year...one is Silver Trees the wallhanging below and a page from "in You River step once same only the can"...my out-of-orthography book, where every page is a non-linear journal entry...over fifty pages!
Silver Trees was purchased in the name of a patron for the Newberry Collection!

Frosty Blackletter....

A year ago I visited my brother in Munich, Germany, arriving on a crystal frosty morning in January...a light snow and high humidity had etched the trees with white...I later visited the Klingspor Museum, in Frankfurt and got to see the works of Rudolf Koch,K arlgeorg Hoefer, and many other exemplary calligraphers and book artists (snapshots posted with permission of the owners of this work, the Klingspor Museum, Frankfurt am Main). Rudolf Koch's worked fascinated me: his early manuscript books show that he has the most beautiful calligraphic hand and impeccable craftsmanship: his blackletter is linear and even, his illustrations traditional and charming. ( The content of his work is work that is mostly the Gospels and other biblical texts.) Later,he used a blackletter that is blocky, uneven and apparently rapidly made, giving it enormous strength and character. It looks so uneven, messy and in some places almost naive and primitve. I am curious as to why he developed it. Guess it's time to invest in his autobiography. I tried to copy this interesting blackletter, with it's heavy foot serifs and executed a series of work on cloth to "practice"...this work is so textural, I pictured fabric. The only finished piece uses some verses of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, white on black fabric...which was written in the coldest week of January, (we were even frosty here in Florida!), and reminded me so much of walking around Munich a year ago....