An art experiment

My art book club (in which we don't actually read books) had an assignment this week to bring in a report on an artist that nobody else had ever heard of.  I have been consumed with activities surrounding my gallery show and left it till the last minute to prepare, so I had to go with an artist that I own a whole book about, H. N. Werkman.

Werkman was from the Netherlands, born in 1882 and died in 1945, executed by the Nazis just two days before Canadian troops liberated his town of Groningen.  He owned a printing business and used type to print artwork that looked quite avant garde and sometimes painterly, but it wasn't produced that way.  Here are two of his pieces:

I love his work and after I re-read the book I decided to try my hand at some Werkman-style art.  I found two capital Ls, two capital Os, a hyphen and an exclamation point in my type case and set to playing.  I inked the type with a foam brush and printed each character individually onto the paper, unlike Werkman's typical process of setting up his type face up on a flatbed press.  So my characters weren't as neatly lined up as his.  Also my hand-inking left blobs of paint around the edges of some of the characters.  But after the paint dried I decided both these irregularities added something to the effect.  Werkman often used the bottom of his type to produce plain rectangles rather than letterforms.  I did a little bit of that too in my experiments and liked it.

I think I'll try more of this technique in the future.  I might even decide that this qualifies as "text" and thus can count as my daily art.

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Seen in the British Museum: a set of alphabet tiles from the floor of Chertsey Abbey, about 1250-1300. They spell out "erat verbum" -- part of the opening of the Gospel of John ("in the beginning was the word").

This is the only set of alphabet tiles ever found in England but many were found in France.

Need help from Canada!

I've written before about my ongoing volunteer work to help catalog the International Honor Quilt project, organized by artist Judy Chicago, in which hundreds of panels were made to commemorate women and women's organizations.  Part of my job is to document what the panels look like, and to accurately transcribe any lettering.

I've had to learn how to type characters with diacritical marks (ä, ç, ê, etc.) and in non-Roman alphabets (θ Σ Δ Ω π).  It took me four emails back and forth with my Hebrew advisor to get this one right -- הדסה -- because the type-Hebrew keyboard I found on the internet didn't have names on the letters and I had to find something that looked like the one on the panel, except in a different font so the letters didn't look exactly alike.

Today I need help!  Here's a panel, made in Povuknituk, Québec, (aren't you impressed by that accent mark?) depicting Inuit culture with Inuit words around the edges.  I don't even know which way is up with the characters.

Who knows somebody who could help me (a) translate and (b) type in this lettering for our database?  Many thanks, much glory and maybe even a bit of loot if you can solve my problem du jour.

And while we're here, check out the beautiful embroidery on the central figure!

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Hey, your N is upside down!

(This is a restaurant where the menu lists "sammiches" so what's a serif  between friends?)

From the archives -- The Actuary's Maps

I rarely make new pieces for a theme challenge, but when there's a call for entries and I just happen to have some nice appropriate work in the pile, I'll dust it off and send it in and see what happens.  Last week I dusted off two pieces in response to a call for art about maps and was reminded that I really liked the work.

The Actuary's Map 1, 2003, 30 x 31"

Two explanations are necessary to understand where these pieces come from.  First, the autobiographical narrative.  I've always been a math geek but for not-valid-in-hindsight reasons I switched my college major away from numbers to words.  But life sometimes gives you what you want and need even if you try hard to avoid it, and I ended up with the perfect job: writing about numbers.

For two decades I worked for a consulting firm that is the world's largest employer of actuaries, and I got to spend a lot of time with some of the most brilliant of them.  I speculated that people who work with numbers all day must see the world in a different light, quantifying things that the rest of us only observe.  I started making a long series of "actuary quilts" that had numbers printed on top of different compositions.

Second, the process narrative.  I had spent a lot of time with dye and discharge and made boxes full of beautiful, enigmatic fabrics that I was struggling to  use (aka the surface design dilemma).  These pieces were made from the legendary Walmart Black, a cotton that discharged to gray, beloved of many of us in those days before Springs Mills (Walmart's supplier) changed their formula and it started discharging to red.  I thought these pieces looked like maps.  Map 1 reminded me of barrier islands with narrow causeways; Map 2 looked like a huge factory complex, maybe next to an airport.

The Actuary's Map 2, 2004, 29 x 18"  (detail below)

The nifty hard-edge geometric marks on the maps came from the clothespins I used to wad up the fabric before it went into the bleach.

These two quilts were out and about in the day; one of them got a blue ribbon at the State Fair.  But then they went out of circulation and into The Box Under The Bed.  Maybe it's time to resurrect them, or maybe it's time to make some more in the same series.

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Typographic observers often refine their eye by hand-setting type, a process in which you have to read in mirror image.  But some words require little translation.

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The Halloween Google "doodle" nameplate yesterday featured six half-ton pumpkins carved with the letters of the name.  As a pumpkin aficionada I loved the concept.  As a typographic observer, I noted that only three of the six letters were easily identifiable.  But that's the glory of having a name like Google -- even when people can only make out half of it, they know what the rest is supposed to be.

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in the cemetery

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Absent the day they taught capital letters in penmanship.

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Place: Japan 

Graffiti: Roman alphabet

Go figure

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Found in a cemetery in Stuttgart.  Hope this doesn't mark the death of written language.

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Sans serif

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bait and switch

Looks a lot like selvages

One of my regular readers, Elena, just put a comment on an old post where I was talking about my quilts made out of selvages.  I said I love selvages because of all the printing on them.

Elena provided a link to a cool new wallpaper, introduced this week, that incorporates recycled newspaper, with the printing still visible.  It reminded her of my selvage quilts, and of course I agree!

wallpaper -- "Newsworthy" by Weitzner

selvage quilt -- "Jaunty F" by Loomis

Elena read an article in the Los Angeles Times.  When I checked it out, I recalled that I saw an article on the same product in the New York Times.

This has my head spinning tonight!  Don't know whether I want to go make another selvage quilt, or make wallpaper out of some selvages (it would probably last a lot longer than the wallpaper made out of newsprint).

Thanks, Elena, for the link!

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The difficult life of an apartment manager -- hmmm, are there any fonts I haven't used yet?