This week at college

The seminar at X Marks the Bokship (how lovely to sit around a table with flowers on it!) was about self publishing - part 1 - the production side (next week, the promotion side of publishing).

Books fit differently into the art world with its galleries than they do into the literary or information world with bookstores. And what is "publishing" anyway - could it be as simple as showing the work, perhaps in a series of exhibitions; does it depend on distribution channels; can you publish a one-off book.

Snippets: the benefits of working with independent publishing companies (eg AND or Bedford Press); the task of talking to printers; the advisability of artists with gallery representation setting up an imprint as a way of making work that doesn't go through the gallery. Strategies for paying for books (do they ever recoup their costs?); printing technologies, eg risograph, and their limitations/possibilities; print on demand; working with a designer; spec sheets.

Because I know a little about commercial publishing (and would quite like to make editions of books-yet-unwritten), I found this really interesting, but it could seem overwhelming, dull - or pointless - to someone approaching book making from a different angle. The issue remains: who are your audience? how do you reach them? -- questions for next week.

This week's lecturer was Dan Hays, who is working on his PhD on the interface between digital technology and painting. He became known for his paintings of guinea pigs - and won the John Moores prize in 1997 -

His landscapes started from a photo of snow, and he appropriated some images from the internet - fuzzy stills from videos that he found on the website of another Dan Hays, in Colorado - and painted them pixel by pixel to make distorted, impressionistic images -

In this twice-reflected made-up image is that the sun is tonally the same as the background -
in monochrome, it disappears -Artists that Dan mentioned: Joseph Beuys's 1974 performance with a coyote (photo here and video here); the Hudson River School of painters; Andy Harper; Helen Sear; Susan Collins' electronic landscapes; Christiane Baumgartner's woodcuts; Tim Head.

A whole day of printing on Thursday - more results in a separate post, but for now here's a piece that came to life when the black lines were overprinted with pale blue. The red marks happened to be on some newsprint lying under the cloth, and rather suggest that this cloth needs a bit of red -
Also, a session with the steamer - I brought in some fabric that had been printed long ago with procion dyes, and pinned it to paper to put in the steamer -

The results, after steaming, washing, and ironing - most of these pieces are destined to be overprinted with "my lines" -

Today is reserved for getting sorted, especially "documenting my documentation" - keeping track of projects started, finished, abandonned, in progress, forgotten - via printing out blog posts and photocopying relevant pages from my notebooks, then putting each project in its own folder. This could take a while -
Why the documentation? Firstly, for memory's sake - I seem to need to write everything down, and it's good to have a chance to review it. Secondly, because some documentation, a reflective journal, is a requirement of the course - and it's meant to include critical discussion of exhibitions attended. Thirdly, predilection: a personal proclivity to indulge in trying to be systematic -- no system = loss of control; with limited memory capacity, it's good to be able to find things.