Tiny Books, Big Expressions

It’s been a few years since I made such a book from one sheet of watercolor paper. I learned how to do it from the incredible Tracy Moore at Teesha Moore’s “Play” retreat up in Port Townsend in Washington State. I made two of them. They are really tiny, about 2 x 2 1/2 inches. I was proud of myself and was super enthused holding them in my hands and imagining their interior potential. Starting there and continuing on my way home on the airplane with only peerless Watercolor papers, a Niji brush, and black and white gel pens, with my buddy Brian Kasstle, I filled one up with faces, and titled it My Mini Face Book. It holds a lot of humor, in some pages.So I then came up with the idea to teach a workshop, but needed my friend Elise Amour to join me in two 2-day workshops in Southern California where we both live. She would teach how to make these books using the coptic stitch and I would teach funky ways of filling up these pages… that happened in the last two weekends…we all, teachers and those attending had such a spirited time. Since then both times after class I continued and finished both books made in class. I enjoyed this process so much…seeing how a theme emerges. There is something so intimate, raw, and real that happens in such a tiny format. You can begin a book and finish it in a few intensely enlivening hours. And boom, you are moved by your own creation, that something out of nothing again. It’s a sensual, tactile little thing, a microcosm of one person, in all that she loves to create.

Here are the two books:

The first one resides mostly in a rusty, heavy, soil-like realm, and does not relate to words very well. And yes, Paul got in there cause he just appeared and was given as a gift to this book.And the other a Mini Face Book of mourning…dispirited faces. A tribute to “Paris” and other wide-spread losses….expressing the thought that change comes in small formats, sometimes too small to contain big sorrows. It was instigated by little paper-mache faces that were gifted to each one of us by Lydia Velarde, one of the kind souls who attended the workshop. The manner in which I created the faces were inspired by Marlene Dumas’ art which for me epitomizes the essence of visual journaling: puddles of water, minimal ink, less control, more raw expression.

I do it all for the purpose of mending…