Altered Books – Eve Barbeau

Memory and Thought

Posted on May 5, 2019May 5, 2019 by evebarbeau in Altered Books, Book, creativity, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

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I’ve been spending some time working on my altered book, as well as writing and painting. Gardening has temporarily been put on hold because the weather has turned cool. There is a promise of snow every now and than, but so far we’ve missed it. It’s dry, dry, dry. We could use some rain. I’d even take the snow if it meant a bit of moisture.

Above are some of the Altered Book pages I’ve been working on. I made a digitial drawing of the ravens a while ago, and then I read Book Two, Child of Dragon’s in the Leather Tales series by Regine Haensel. In this book, Regine features two ravens name Thought, Memory. I love that, and though my ravens don’t have names, it’s nice to think about thought and memory and where they intersect and change each other.

The leafed garland is a scan of an engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian, a 17th Century naturalist, entomologist and artist. She did some amazing work.

You can find Regine’s books here, and read about Maria Sibylla Merian here and here.

Big, Bigger

Posted on March 4, 2019 by evebarbeau in Altered Books, Egg Tempera, Modernist, Painting, Process, Uncategorized

When we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) we were fortunate to see an exhibition by German modernist painters. It was a delight to see the work of a particular favourite, Anselm Kiefer. These paintings are BIG. “Big paintings” are a particular hallmark of modernist art. I’m talking about physically big paintings, and not the quality of the work, though in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, those two things were often conflated.

Seeing these paintings kicked off a desire to make large paintings ,again. When I was a student in the 1980s I created some very large paintings. Big Red, below, is 8 feet tall by 4 feet wide. The piece was created entirely of bits of paper and spills of acrylic paint. These paintings had no backing and you can imagine what a nightmare they were to hang.

Big Red, 1987, collage construction, 8′ x 4′

When I began to paint in encaustic, my work became smaller in size. In Progress, 2013, encaustic on panel is about 40 x 30 inches.

In Progress 2013_v1 — In Progress, 2013, encaustic on panel, 30″ x 40″

This week I finished this egg tempera painting. It is bigger than the sketchbook, and alterbook works I’ve been showing you, but nowhere near as large as In Progress.

Pointless2_sm2 — Pointless, Iterations series, egg tempera on panel, 20 x 16 inches

One more thing. A loyal reader, Regine, commented that the altered book paintings I posted last week made her think of quilting. I don’t quilt, but I’ve long recognized that my work has an affinity with quilting. Here are two collage paintings from the 1990s that show a strong link to piecing quilts.

Bouquet Zokalo

You know what’s funny? Size doesn’t matter with digital work at all, at least not in the three dimensional way. If you have enough pixels you can see the work any size you want. Think of an iMax screen and your cellphone screen.

After Holiday Energy

Posted on February 25, 2019 by evebarbeau in Altered Books, creativity, Uncategorized

sm Altered Book a-b sm Altered Book c-d

I had a lovely holiday. Central California was cooler than normal but a whole lot warmer than the -30 C we’ve had in Saskatchewan for weeks and weeks. There are mutterings that this has been the coldest winter, here, in 80 years. Maybe it is, but it always feels that way in February.

After getting over some initial travel exhaustion I was excited to get back to my work. I started with a few more altered book pages. And today, I got back to revising my time travel novel, The Chronos Project.

While I was away, we visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was delighted to see some brilliant work. It made me want to paint large again. Will I? We’ll see. For the next week, I suspect I’ll continue with my sketchbook work.

Large paintings make a big impact, especially on huge white gallery walls, but there’s a lot to like about small paintings. They create a feeling of intimacy I like. I suspect that small works are considered ‘Women’s’ work, and that’s okay. It’s well past time to look at women’s work more carefully.

Making Poetry When You Havent a Clue

Posted on February 11, 2019 by evebarbeau in Altered Books, creativity, Painting, Process, Studio, Uncategorized, Writing

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I’m sorry to leave you with so little today, but I’m about to leave the frozen north and I have very little time to write.

I want to you know that I haven’t a clue how to write poetry, but I do know that a certain ambiguity and wonderful words are part of it. This week I created another altered book page, and I “Austin Kleon’d” it. Austin Kleon is a young writer who, among other things, writes poetry by redacting newspaper or magazine articles. Look him up. He’s a very wise young man.

Lord Johnnie, the adventure novel I’m altering was published in 1949. The language is florid in comparison to our current tastes, and somehow I ended up with this rather dark bit of writing. Since the images I’ve made have taken on a dark tone, I decided to go with it.

A Monday Sort of Girl

Posted on February 4, 2019 by evebarbeau in Altered Books, Book, Digital, Drawing, Gardening, Graphics Tool, Uncategorized

Raven Girl2 — Raven Girl, 2019 ink, digital print on altered book.

It’s c-c-c-old! It’s ‘extreme temperature’ warnings cold. When I start the car this morning, every warning light cames on: check engine, brakes warning (!), others… My away mission is necessarily cancelled. I should mind. I don’t. Did I mention it’s cold?

In truth, I’m being a baby. It is cold, but I’ve lived in the middle of Canada my whole life and it’s been colder. This is an area of temperature extremes. It can be +40 Celsius in summer and -40 Celsius in the winter. Today, it’s only -28 C. Could be worse.

Above are another two pages from my altered book. I drew the picture of the little girl and the ravens from a photo reference. Do you know the covers of Ransom Rigg’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children? They’re amazing, and just a little bit creepy. I wanted that kind of feel.

This is a digital drawing. (I use an opensource software called Krita (which is amazing) and a Huion display drawing tablet.(also amazing)), I then printed the drawing on mat photo paper.

To prepare the book page I used a mixture of Higgens sepia ink and Liquitex permanent black ink to cover the print part of the book. Then with glue, more ink, and a terrific Jelly Roll gel pen, in gold, I put it all together. Some things came out as expected. Some didn’t, but the accidents were happy ones. When I put glue on the back of my digital print, it dampened the front of the image enough to turn the sepia tone green. It works. I’ll take it.

The raven girl is pretty stoic looking in her strangeness. Me too, pretty stoic. It doesn’t stop me thinking of plants and gardens though. So I finished the weekend off with this: