The book, that is the leaf of time, space that becomes place and a world.
Guy Laramee bookwork in transformation — presented by Foster White Gallery, Seattle
A friend of mine pointed out a show, of an artist — with a broad vocabulary of explorations, Guy Laramee — and it [his work] reminded me of other journeys in the imagining of books, the stories about books, buying books, and the books ON BOOKS.
And too, journeys: my travels, going back to old shops in Paris — antiquarian dealers in London, UK, Firenze, Italia, Salzburg, Austria — shops grandiose and pompous to small sellers proud of their mere legacy [and in each, layers of storytelling] the scent of sheared and torn, not sliced paper, leathers [birch tar and the underpinning of cuir de Russe] — the density of inks [sometimes hand made] printed in careful mass [500 or so, copies — and not on a conveyor belt, running 100+ MPH.]
Consider books, the[ir] journey [and the innate, inbound meditative and moment-capturing journals] of imagining — opening them, worlds appear, in the touch of them, there is a voyage of texture, scent and sound. They carry you away. Guy Laramee takes the illustrative character — the transporting qualities of the book far further, “legendizing” books as mythic mountains and crevasse, crags and cliffs, caverns — journey places. The very clustered fabric of the book — the old covers, the classically erudite title pages, the Turkish-marbled end papers — they became fabric, tapestry to a dimensional ground of stories, told — a kind of “world of the small thing” delicately captivating the viewer who holds [and is held by] the story, in the story, carved into the story.
Earlier in my life, I’d considered art as more of a career than design — in paintings and drawings — and I showed at the Gallery below – Foster White. This string of images — gathered below — comes straight from an e-blast from the Gallery.
Interesting to ponder the sheer transportive power of the book, an agglomeration of minuscule alphabetic characters, ink-daubed and impressed and bit hard into carefully-made book papers — the leaves: torn and deckled stocks that carries the reader off to the dream of their personal reading voyage. Then, in Laramee — the book as story that is embodied in the telling of the pages, formed, themselves.
See below, for a series of links on our thinking on the power of books.
Question[s] from us to you?
• What, to your take, is the power of the book for you?
• What has the book done for you?
• Where, with the book, have you gone?
Girvin explorations and writings on books:
Scribble books: https://tim.girvin.com/?p=1170
The place of books: https://www.girvin.com/blog/?p=6839
The mystery of the book | Jorge Luis Borges:
https://www.girvin.com/blog/?p=3268
The ritual of the book: https://tim.girvin.com/?p=753
The library of the mind: https://www.girvin.com/blog/?p=3545
TSG
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G I R V I N | THE MESSAGE IS THE VOICE
DESIGNED TEXTUAL CONTENT: THE BREATH OF SOULBRAND
http://bit.ly/sJ4IjO