Interesting find
Sunday, January 8th, 2006Occasionally, while cleaning my room or moving heaven and earth looking for something, I find notes I’ve written to myself. They originate late at night, when I have to get something out of my head so that I can go to sleep, written on whatever paper and with whatever pen comes to hand. Then they disappear, until months later, when I’ve all but forgotten what I wrote and why. I just turned up one of these notes. I do remember the context of this one. I had just bought a copy of Somerset Studio magazine on the recommendation of a group of altered book artists on WetCanvas. The magazine was my first real taste of the wider world of altered books and other similar arts. This was my reaction:
Despite my increasing interest in altered books, I remain, at heart, very much a traditionalist, with a passion for clean lines, bright, pure colors, and minimal “frou frou.” Certainly this explains my attraction to Lichtenstein and my rather intense dislike of nearly everything post-medieval and pre-Impressionism/ expressionism. (Exception: Vermeer. Genius, beautiful colors.) Many of these altered books, while beautiful on one level, are painfully monochromatic, and even dull, busy, pretentiously “artsy”, incomprehensible, and largely lacking in any sense of fun. Cluttered. Maybe I’m too much a teenager, but please, don’t take yourself too seriously. And not everything needs a brown glaze on top of it.
Needless to say, I have not purchased another copy of that magazine.
