Canvas to the Imagination

It’s really frustrating when I spend a lot of time working on something and when I’m done I don’t feel happy with it. That’s how I felt about this altered book Wednesday afternoon after spending most of the day on it. I felt the composition was too busy and I’d managed to completely de-emphasize the book part of this altered book because pages and bookish elements are mostly hidden. I stepped away for awhile and was able to look at it with fresh eyes later. Now I like it. It’s very different from the other altered books I’ve created so far.

I’d been trying to come up with ideas to make further use of the bag of wooden animals I picked up at a garage sale. I used a tiger and rabbit in a previous work, and chose the bear this time with the thought that it’s posture resembled that of a performing bear. I went looking for a rubber ball for the bear to balance upon and then remembered I had a set of circus-themed paper dolls in my stash of ephemera. And with that, a circus book was born!

Materials used in this book: book, tissue paper, recycle paper bag, wooden bear, rubber ball, stars, circus-themed paper dolls, thread and needles.

My friend Kai was the second out of town guest in Vancouver during the month of October, and of course I made sure to take her portrait for the series. Kai has a red winter coat just like I do and I wanted to include it in the shot. I hadn’t intended to fill the whole scene with red, but with coat, umbrella and Japanese Maple tree all in gorgeous shades of my favorite colour, red ruled the day. (As it should.)

The Japanese Maple I had in mind for this shot wasn’t fully turned at the time, so after I took a few shots and wasn’t satisfied with the results, Kai suggested another spot with red trees. She’d just happened to be in the Queen Elizabeth Park area a few days before and noticed a whole street with them. This turned out to be the perfect spot to shoot what I had in mind and it was wonderful to see so many Japanese Maple trees covered in red leaves all in a row.

This is my seventh altered book, which kind of amazes me because I only started making these in mid-September. I’ve been wanting to make more before deciding what to do next in regards to showing and selling them. I want to have a group of them all together and get an overview of where I’m going with this before I can let any of them go or make decisions about a show. I’ve set the goal to have ten altered books completed by the end of the year. I began working on number eight today so it could happen.

I started this butterfly book on the same day as the previous altered book with folded pages. I decided to retain the 3D accordion affect by leaving the folded pages loose and gluing one corner of each to the proceeding page to retain the shape and structure. This altered book was definitely one of the trickier ones to create. The wire I used in the centre of the book bent out of shape easily and the middle butterflies were not very cooperative about gluing onto them. The pages were also quite brittle and would tear easily. All factors that make this the most delicate and fragile altered book art I’ve made so far.

Materials used in this altered book: book, Japanese paper, resistor wire, acetate (?) butterflies, gel medium and glue dots.