Images With(In) Books

Today’s print workshop was a valuable experience. I have made intaglio prints in the past, but I had never tried using a printing press like the ones available today. Relief and intaglio printing have many differences, so I was glad to have the opportunity to see the print studio today. It was fun to see the three presses and get a better sense of how they work. I liked the ability to choose between wood and lead for making our prints and seeing how to line up the blocks in the galley.

Getting to work in groups to design a print was a nice experience, since we all got to participate and voice our own ideas of how the image should look. My group decided to use the wood blocks to print. I liked the wood blocks because there were a large variety of images we could use in addition to text. I’ve never printed text before, so I found it challenging to think about the fact that since it was a print, the words would be printed backwards. I didn’t get to help with the actual printing process, but I’ve seen the product of our work and think it turned out really well. The image is crisp and has a rich color, and I can see how useful printing presses were in the past for mass producing a text. While it took a while to make our galley to print, once it was made it could be printed as many times as we wanted.

I enjoyed learning about typesetting in the print workshop today. It’s always interesting to learn about the origin of phrases like “out of sorts.” After having seen and experienced how time-consuming the process can be, I understand how frustrating being out of sorts could actually be. The scriptorium workshop gave me a greater appreciation for the process of illumination – particularly for the amount of time it required to create such vivid details. Similarly, with the printing workshop I was given extra appreciation for how hard and time consuming typesetting is. When making an entire manuscript like a bible or a novel, it must take an incredible amount of time to create a single page, much less an entire book. It certainly makes sense that inventors target processes such as typesetting, which take inordinate amounts of time, and create devices that automate and speed up the process. It’s hard to believe that I could print an entire book today by pressing a few buttons on my computer and waiting at the printer in less time than it took me to figure out how to typeset a single sentence in our workshop!

In addition to thinking a lot about the process of typesetting, I also thought a lot about my collaborative project and therefore Goya in today’s workshop. We have discussed the style and themes in Goya’s work at length, but the printing workshop provided me with extra insight into his motivation and commitment to his work. It has been hard enough to come up with a clever way to construct a societal critique in our collaborative project, so Goya’s ability to not only integrate a clever narrative into his art, but also develop beautiful images using a very time-consuming technique is admirable. I’m glad that we have had the opportunity to supplement our classroom learning with hands-on exercises and videos that allow us to explore the techniques used by the authors and gain additional insights.

In class, we discussed a little bit about what a book actually is. For me, a book is an object that has pages inside of it, and that has words or images that are fixed and no longer/not subject to change. The reason I describe it this way is that for me books can also be an art form. An artist book is an incredibly fascinating object that does not have the stigma of “don’t touch.” While they might need to be handled delicately, they are meant to be handled. Usually they are beautiful, tactile, and have an intellectual meaning- all of the components that make up my favorite kinds of artwork.

Here are some cool examples:

Most of these are accordian bound, but there are other kinds of binding which can only be done by hand that are unusual.

A personal favorite is the dos a dos method:

One of my pet peeves on this campus is the poor-functioning printers on a regular basis. For some reason, they always seem to be broken or inundated with paper. I am hoping that the print workshop will provide me with an understanding and appreciation for laser printing, even if it does not function spot-on each time. At least we don’t have to hand set all of our papers…

Last year, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Rippeon in a print-making seminar for my poetry writing workshop. For the featured poets coming to campus, we produced prints of their poems to be distributed at the readings. I still have my prints hanging in my dorm room! Professor Rippeon stressed during the process that print-making is truly the combination of art and literature; the act of “performing” literature by aptly selecting colors and forms that mirror the content of the poem. Moreover, we took into consideration some of the poet’s preferences. I LOVED this workshop; it is still one of my most memorable experiences in the literature classes I have taken because it was the first time I was exposed to the unification of art form and literary production.

One thing I remember from my work print-making is that it can difficult to maneuver the paper in the press. As shown in the video clips in the preparatory email, the print-maker must hold down the piece of paper while cranking at the same time. This can be trickier than it looks…

While we were talking about The Sick Rose in class on Wednesday, I couldn’t help but wonder if we were giving Blake a little too much credit for his work. Some of the things we were saying were clearly true. The rose clearly makes a circle on the page in which different stages of the moth’s life are portrayed. So obviously there’s the idea of the circle of life. And there’s obviously the idea of death and rebirth illustrated in the woman/worm/thing coming out of the dying rose. However, I also think there were some elements of the analysis that can’t actually be inferred from the painting as having been Blake’s ideas. For example, I don’t think it’s fair to say that Blake was trying to show that the circle of life was inescapable since the poem and illustrations were contained within the stem of the rose. Clearly he was trying to make the rose a circle to show the circle of life, but where else could he have placed the text? Simply by the nature of putting a circle on the page, he was cutting off the amount of space he had to write and draw. Trying to accomplish this outside of the circle would simply be illogical. Though this example may seem a bit nitpicky, it was not the only assumption that I felt we irrationally attributed to Blake; however, it is the one that I remember most clearly. This DID make me wonder though. How much can we ever really attribute to an author or artist? Sometimes their intentions are clear, but how deeply can we really analyze a text or image without attributing our own thoughts to the artist?

I found the speaker to be very interesting and informative! I find Blake to be a little confusing – his messages are very ambiguous, and, while that can often make for good commentary, it confuses the intention and point of some of his pieces. However, his work is very intriguing and he was definitely skilled at his craft.

Personally, I enjoy The Sick Rose because of the themes it explores, but I don’t love that it doesn’t have one clear message. I do like that the illustrations on the page support the text of the poem and vice versa. One cannot be understood without the other. This kind of textual and pictorial relationship makes for a very interesting piece.

I meant to post this right after I watched the movie, but by the time I finished all 1 hour and 40 something minutes of it, it was already Wednesday (I started it Tuesday night) and time to sleep. Then I forgot all about it until now…

Anyways, before I say anything else let me say I love all of Goya’s work and his is progression from bright and cheerful subject material to dark and fantastical is absolutely fascinating.

However, what I didn’t love was this movie. I was constantly confused and annoyed as I paused and rewinded for the umpteenth time, having looked away for a fraction of a second and missed the subtitles as well as being worried for the state of Goya’s health -every few minutes my roommate would laugh as I made statements such as “whatever Goya’s smoking, he needs to stop” and “I’m not sure but I think Goya’s going on another acid trip”.

All in all, because of these complaints, I wasn’t able to appreciate the beauty of the art displayed in the movie or to contemplate it or Goya himself in any depth until I had gotten a good eight hours of sleep and dreams had washed the majority of this strange movie from my memory.

Firstly, Goya and Blake are wonderful. Please don’t misunderstand me. But I feel it is important to question whether their illustrations really have relevance to a class called ‘Images With(in) Books’.

My concerns surround the reproducibility of the illustrations. In saying that, I mean, the illustrations could easily be placed in a number of other mediums (and often are: consider Goya en Burdeos and the hanging Caprichos). To me this renders the images not applicable to ‘images within a book’ but ‘images that happen to be within a book’. In other words, if we were to place Leonardo Da Vinci’s works within a book, could we study it in class?

In speaking with Professor Serrano, she mentioned that the images we study rely on their historical context as having been originally illustrated within books. And that is a reasonable statement, a statement that hinges upon her informing the class that she will describe Blake and Goya’s impact upon the ‘illustration’ in coming classes. But even illustrations are not attributable just to books. Cinema, paintings and sculpture can all illustrate. Even ekphrasis, an important part of class studies, is a concept that can be reproduced in any other visual medium, not just the book!

In essence, the class never draws attention to the book as an object, an object where the image works ‘meta-fictionally’ i.e. a picture flowing between the two open pages (hindered by the page fold):

or flip book animations:

…images and illustrations that can ONLY be applied to the book (and there are many, many more!). Such images, at least to me, sound like they would more adequately represent a class that is called ‘Images With(in) Books’. As opposed to simply viewing images that could be hung up in any art gallery.

I really enjoyed Wednesday’s visit from Janelle Schwartz. Though I found Blake’s Songs of Experience interesting while reading them myself before class, I definitely got a lot more out of our in class discussion. I liked that we chose to focus on one poem rather than talking about the book as a whole. When I read The Sick Rose before class, I definitely did not pay enough attention to or even notice at all the innuendos or all that was going on in the illustration. It was interesting to see what different things everyone in class noticed that I did not.

I thought it was interesting that Janelle mentioned she hates when Blake’s poems are taught as just text without the illustrations rather than as prints. I’ve had to read Blake’s poems in class many times (especially The Tyger), but always just as text. I didn’t even know that the poems had illustrations until reading Songs of Experience for this class. Seeing the poems as prints definitely changes the experience of reading for me. After going through The Sick Rose in class, I’d definitely agree with Janelle that the poems should always be presented with their illustrations. The illustrations add a lot to reader’s interpretations of the poem, as Janelle’s presentation pointed out. It was curious to me that the prints often use different colors for the same image, like how the image of The Sick Rose that was projected for the class was very different than the image in our book. I wonder how the different coloring affects the act of reading and interpreting the image.