Focusing on the professional side . . .

I consider this my personal blog, and in it I include what's going on with my life, what I'm seeing around the island, in the yard, etc.

Occasionally I include images of my latest work, but mostly it's personal, with a lot of iPhone shots.

I want to keep my professional images in one place, the ones I upload for sale at Fine Art America / Pixels, and the projects I'm working on.

So just to complicate my life, I've set up a "professional" blog here: https://carolleighart.blogspot.com where I can showcase what people are buying, what I've recently created, experimental images, etc., all directed to the professional aspect of my work.

My goal is to post daily, but we all know how that goes! If you'd like to follow me on that blog, please subscribe to it and you'll be notified when new material comes up. Thanks!

All images copyright ©2019 Carol Leigh

Daily Photo 20190127: Work in progress

This is a close-up of part of an image I'm working on -- a photomontage containing pictures taken in Anacortes. I like where it's heading right now, but it's definitely not done. Just something I'm working on today, good for my "photo a day" project.

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Daily Photo 20190113 Work in progress

A bit of detail from the "Japanese" artist books I'm making. Lots of time spent in the studio today, experimenting with plaster, dyes, inks, and new papers. A fun/frustrating day. But not nearly as frustrating as the Los Angeles Chargers felt...

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Daily photo 20190106 The beat goes on . . .

I’m so slow at this. I’m creating pages for a series of three handmade books, all with an aged and sort of raggedy/soft Japanese look.  I need to make at least 60 pages. And it’s taking me forever.

Right now I’m working on 16 of the pages, tearing papers, making small collages, integrating everything on all 16 at once, which means they will never be finished until all 60 pages are created and can contain no more elements. Then I will organize the pages, dividing them up into three completed books.

So I look at these pages daily, adding something here, something there, painting over something there, something here. What you’re seeing in this shot are the pages all spread out, overlapping one another, some stacked together.

But I’m also working on small handmade artist books — no text, just painted papers containing interesting shapes, forms, and colors.

I admire and envy other artists who seem to quickly make and show their books, their creations, while I slog through the process. Perhaps it's because I’ve devoted so much time to photography rather than making handmade books, and I’m learning as I go along. Okay, that sounds good! I’ll stick with that explanation!

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Work in progress . . .

As I'm making all the individual pages for my three Japanese ledger-style artist books, I'm also making little collages, using small scraps of paper that get pushed aside. Each of these mini-collages contains maybe 3-5 bits of paper. And then, whenever/wherever appropriate, I glue them onto the book pages.

I know this is tough to visualize, but each page of the book contains what I think of as a big collage, consisting of inked, stamped, painted, torn papers. They're kind of like scrapbook pages. The books are always in a state of flux as I add more things, rip away papers, etc. No page (double-sided!) will ever be really done until I begin putting all three books together.

I'll show some of the pages in a forthcoming post, which might help you visualize my concept.

Whatever the results (and I truly think they're going to be wonderful), I am enjoying the entire process. To call it "fun" isn't quite accurate. I read the other day an unattributed quote: "Art is fun in retrospect."

Right now I'm sort of in a zone, picking, choosing, arranging, making decisions. I stick with it for a couple hours and then have to take a break.

So no, it's not "giddy" fun, not like being in the front seat of the rollercoaster, but rather a quiet, satisfying sense of making something. You know?
----------
I'm also on Instagram if you'd like to see more of my work there. Well, even if you don't want to see more of my work, I'm there anyway!
----------
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

What I'm working on . . .

I have been working on (since it seems forever) making a handmade book. I’ve been thinking of it as a “Kyoto” book, since I’m incorporating photographs I took In Japan, but it’s really not about Kyoto.

I’ve completed 10 pages. And have maybe 20 more to go. It’s 12” wide and 4.5” high and thick. It will be Japanese stab-bound on the left side. And it will be meant to be hung on a wall by a cord. The style is similar to a daifuku-cho, a Japanese ledger book.

Each page is a collage, both front and back, with the back much simpler, less detailed than the front. This unnamed book is designed to be held, touched, bent, paged through. It feels soft, worn, weathered, ragged, frayed, and irregular.

This year I’ve been gathering together appropriate papers for the book — papers I’ve dyed, inked, stained, painted, crumpled, torn, folded, and sometimes waxed. The collage items are old postage stamps, hanko signatures (“chops”), postal cancellations, rice paper images, rubber stamps, water stains, pages from antique Japanese books and ledgers, and much, much more.

Since I’ve never done this before, I’m winging it, seeing how my photographs handle being tinted, how glues hold up when the papers get wet, and how my printer inks react with water. My printer ceased working and so I got a new one. But the inks are markedly different and don’t react the same way, causing my processes to change constantly.

So here are bits and pieces of what I’m doing. From upper left to right you see a sample unfinished page sitting on top of other papers, a close-up of a page, examples of postage stamps I have to choose from, then my “paper table,” photos that I’ve stained and are now drying, another sample unfinished page, a number of signature hankos (chops) that I use here and there, a close-up of a stained paper (doesn’t that look cool?), and a close-up of part of another page.

I. Love. This. The process has been a huge learning curve, trial and (mostly) error. Full of surprises (always a good thing), and the book pages/collages are wonderful to hold, to page through, to curl and bend and touch. They even sound good, sometimes crackling, sometimes softly brushing one another.

Having projects, having a purpose, making something is important to me. And in my mostly digital world, having a physical result is most refreshing! I will attempt to update more and more as things have begun speeding up. Wish me luck!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

Work in progress

A little under the weather, but the past few days I've been working on creating images for my handmade Kyoto book. It hasn't helped that my printer appears to be dying rather quickly and a new one may be in the offing.

The book will consist of a lot of antique Japanese papers as well as papers I've created -- stained, painted, folded, spindled, mutilated. Each page will be a collage of sorts, incorporating a photograph that I've stained with tea, coffee, ink, paint, etc.

This is an example of what I have in mind, sort of, for the photographs. But until I can print out the pictures, I'm kind of at a standstill.

The pages will be horizontal, about 6" high, 15" wide, made of a variety of paper types, bound together on the left. One side (the front) of each page will be a collage with photo; the reverse side also a collage, but a very simple one.

For this digital photomontage, I used a photo I took of a maiko (geisha) in Kyoto, heavily stained rice papers, ledger papers, etc. When I print the final version, onto rice paper, I will print it much lighter and then will hand-stain it with a sepia-toned ink.

My goal is a book that looks very old, very soft, weathered, stained and mysterious. As with most of the things I've been making lately, it's designed to be held, touched, very tactile in nature. Although this is a book, it's not meant to be a pristine portfolio of images, rather the photos will simply become a small part of the whole.

If I can just get the damned printer to work!

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.