Arranging Furniture
Vernon, BC: Greenboathouse Press, 2021.
Limited Edition. Paperbound.
#44 of a limited edition of 60 numbered copies of a total of 70 copies (10 lettered copies were reserved prior to publication). Winner of the Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design.
Printer Jason Dewinetz originally sought to produce a book recreating paintings of Agnes Martin, using only furniture (that is, lengths of wood used in printing formes to corral print and create margins or fill blank spaces in the printing process) to reproduce her compositions. His colleague Aaron Peck encouraged him not to reproduce Martin’s work, but to use the furniture to produce original pieces. The final book is comprised of 24 compositions accompanied by an introductory essay by Aaron Peck discussing the prints in a context of Canadian landscape painting and, in particular, the colour palette of the Okanagan Valley. From Aaron Peck’s description in the foreword: The 24 prints are a "series of grids in green, blue, and turquoise, progressing through a sequence of formal studies of line, block, and colour, recalling wood, lake, sky, and tree. Formally similar to the paintings of Agnes Martin that inspired them, they are patterns of arresting simplicity. Part of their meditative pull, though, is their compositional method - clues of which can be seen in the prints. I first noticed the warmth of the colour blocks, which have been made by impressions from wood, not metal. Instead of type, the furniture - pieces of wood used to lock up type in a chase during printing - has been manipulated and then inked to execute the images printed on the two presses in the Greenboathouse printshop: a Vandercook 219 (1957) and a 15-21 (1955). These prints reveal the grain and age of this 100-year-old furniture made from cherry and beechwood that, in order to make the image, have been propped up in the bed of the press, without type - an uncommon use of these normally humble, unobtrusive tools. The use of furniture in the place of type gives prominence to an element in the printing process that is typically invisible in the finished product."
Item #901405ISBN: 9781894744423
9-1/4" x 12-3/4", bound in stiff paper case of St. Armand Sisal Coffee with exposed linen thongs, with one of the furniture compositions printed on the front, end-sheets are Barcham Green Charter Oak, printed on 150gsm Hahnemuhle Biblio, the text is hand-set in 16pt Cloister Lightface, cast in-house from the original ATF matrices, enclosed in a full-cloth slipcase.
A beautiful production, as new in slip-case, with printer's original black paper wrap-around sheath.
Price: $575.00