Thursday, March 19, 2015

Typographic Transfiguration

I've finished printing the content for Catholics, an artist's book I'm working on at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. It is a limited-edition memoir that relates my Catholic upbringing as it interweaves several themes: Church history, pre-Christian mythology, and the places where such spiritualities resonate with twentieth-century pop culture.

One of the book's features is a series of seven communion wafers/solar crosses. These images are surrounded by Bruce Rogers–inspired frames letterpress printed from metal typographic ornaments that alchemically shift throughout the course of the book. The wafers/solar crosses animate their own narrative, a transmuting framework that comments on the book’s other threads. I also adapted the sequence into a suite of prints.

To see a post about some of the book's hand-drawn illustrations, click here. I'm excited to start binding the edition of 25 this week. Meanwhile, check out the wafer/solar cross series below.








Friday, March 13, 2015

'Intimate in detail ... wide in scope and variety'

Foreword Reviews has posted a new review of The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales. They describe the collection's stories 'as intimate in detail as they are wide in scope and variety,' and calls them 'vignettes, hints at the lives of characters who come and go throughout the book, often while leaving an indelible mark on the reader.' You can buy the book from Small Press Distribution!