Am walking a bit of a tightrope right now, balancing time in the studio with minding my day job. It would be soooo easy to let the day job work slowly fade away, if there weren't financial repercussions. I keep telling myself that the client work underwrites the art. For now. Recently finished Lewis Hyde's The Gift and, although I found much of it tedious, I mined a few gems. Namely, some of the thinking/rationale behind protecting the arts from the marketplace. It's resonated for me and cooled my heels on wanting to figure out a "business model" for my art.
We're about 2/3 finished with the inside trays on the CityDance boxes...
Pyramid-Atlantic summer intern Nora Simon
...and I'm starting to get a little pickier on craftsmanship, now that we've got some rapport going with the interns and volunteers. Designed a companion booklet that will rest on top of the books and will post pics once I have something more concrete. Looks like we'll gold stamp the box lid, which I've never done before, so that'll be fun to learn. We're nowhere near that step, just trying to think ahead on cover board prep options.
Made a little progress this weekend on my own edition for the project. Actually, it's been very meditative coating digital ground on both sides of 150 sheets of handmade paper. It's a time-consuming step, but I like the crispness of the text I get using the ground vs. uncoated on my pigment printer. A couple of hours into it, I realized it could be much easier if I used Susan King's paint roller trick - so I got me a 6" foam roller, paint tray and am cookin' along:
Created a nice rhythm on Sunday: coat some paper, hang it on the line in my studio to dry, do a load of laundry, work on a proposal for a client, plant some hostas, rinse and repeat.