Sunday, July 26, 2015

Catch Your Breath

The baroqueness of my new artist's book, Catholics, is at times overwhelming. It uses letterpress-printed typography to build images; references Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, and Carl Jung in its theatrical illustrations; and draws inspiration from sixth-century souvenirs in its collaged eulogiae.

In order to allow the reader some relief from the denser sections of prose and imagery, I also included interludes. There are two types: chthonic and eremitic.



The chthonic invokes sacred traditions associated with the underworld.



And the eremitic conjures the Christian custom of engaging with the desert as a site of spiritual seeking.

The interludes' backgrounds are letterpress printed from photopolymer plate halftones—the chthonic from a scan of crumpled flax paper made by Cave, the eremitic from stone-textured spray paint. Their text is printed from varyingly letterspaced Centaur metal type.

Catholics is influenced by twentieth-century cinema, both in theme and content. I wanted the interludes to act like the long-abandoned practice of offering an intermission in the middle of a movie, a chance to reflect and review what you've seen so far. Click here to learn more about the book.

Sunday, July 12, 2015

... a Eucharistic dust jacket that wends along a desert wind ...

That’s me, I must have thought somewhere just beyond myself, a thought like a Eucharistic dust that wends along a desert wind. An infiltrator destined for hell. The singed flesh felt distinct.
—from Catholics

I just finished printing a dust jacket for my new artist's book, Catholics. It was letterpress printed from photopolymer plates, except for the spine, which was printed from metal type (Goudy Text and Spartan Heavy). The front cover also features a die-cut Eucharistic wafer/solar cross, a preview of a motif that runs throughout the book.







A copy of Catholics was recently acquired by the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections. To learn more about the book, which is a limited-edition memoir told through text and image, visit my website