This piece started because I picked up a golden book I had put aside to alter.
The book was a Muppets/Sesame Street story and none of the colour palette appealed to me.
While I had a lot of ideas on how to work with it (some I will return to, including the Golden Book tracings I did a few years ago somehow), I spied some offcuts Nicola gave me months ago just sitting innocently in my studio, and they became the base for the new pages. I especially liked the ones she did with string / glue.
She had given me a heap of rice paper, but only enough to do most of the pages. The cover I did with the usual printmaking paper offcuts she also gave me.
So this is a collab with Nicola.
I began by drawing in a few chairs (my fall back when I’m not clear. I do like how the black sharpie/garden marker didn’t really take totally to the rice paper, leaving some texture.
Then i searched my evernote for a poem or quote about chairs, finding that I have surprisingly few, just really the Patience of Ordinary Things, which I do indeed love. So i kept on with the chairs and the words. I’m not sure about how the words I’ve written are different sizes on each page, but it’s not a big deal.
I joined the black lines across pages to make them seem like they all belonged together.
Video below is what the book looked like originally
And this is the video post-alteration.
And here are photos of the individual pages.
