About six years ago, I started getting into the practice of making “Artist’s Books.”
Artist’s Books are different from sketchbooks in that they revolve around a central theme or contain an over-arching idea, rather than being a place for sketching and notation.
Detail of a drawing from SWIMS
The SWIMS book was assembled in 2017 while I was exploring a motif based on a photograph of the Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky. For a period of 6-8 months, I made hundreds of sketches and dozens of monotypes of the pose, examining nuanced differences in depiction and expression. I used a typewriter to “draw” waves for the title page of the book, and hand-coiled an antique wire through the holes of the individual pages, which gives it a different look and feel from a typical coil-bound drawing book.
Swimmer, oil on un-stretched canvas (2017)
The work from SWIMS culminated in the Swimmer painting, also from 2017, which was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Maine that same year. (Here’s a link to a blog post about the exhibition).
Most of the drawings from the cycle have been disseminated, but the ones in this book are my personal favorites.
SWIMS
One-of-a-kind Artist’s Book
(book board, vinyl paint, antique wire, drawing paper, soy ink, typewriter ribbon, Glassine)
8.5 x 6 in., 31 pages
2017