Conjure,
if you will, the twang and deep throated rumble of a four-stringed biwa
lute, accompanied by the tense voice of a blind storyteller who sits in
the shadows. His song, the "Heike Monogatari," is ageless, having
survived for thousands of years in the form of narrative poetry,
although it has also found life in classic paintings, books, plays,
films, and musical scores and is considered to be the greatest of the
Japanese war stories.
My newest letterpress/linoleum block book, "Mimi-nashi Hoichi," recounts the story of a sightless biwa player named Hoichi, whose
ears are sheared off following a score of nights performing the "Heike
Monogatari" song cycles in a cemetery off the shores of Shiminoseki,
Yamaguchi-ken.
Over the course of roughly four months, I was one of three artists that
were invited to do a residency at the wonderful San Francisco Center for
the Book, to complete the project. The challenge of the Small Plates
residency is that the book must be 4" x 4" trim size, and utilize the
resources and equipment of the Center as best as you can. It was an
incredible experience, with the best access to book arts tools,
equipment, and most importantly— knowledge in the form of staff, other
fellow printers, and even the other two artists in residence, Michelle
Wilson and Andy Rottner.
The first step required me to draw and hand carve the many linoleum block illustrations
to accompany the text which was printed entirely on letterpresses.
The text was printed from polymer plates created by local printing powerhouse, Logos Graphics, which took a fair amount of wiggling around to make sure that everything registered correctly since the pages were printed six pages up per run. No room for errors!
The entire final book was printed using black Ganson rubberbased inks on Chandler and Price and Vandercook letterpresses.
And then there was the binding. I gathered up a group of my most awesome book arts friends in the SF Bay Area, plied them with food (thank you for cooking, Thy Tran!) and had many, many hands at the table to pierce, clamp, trim, collate, glue, fold, sew, and put the books to bed.
Twenty pages printed on natural and jade handmade Loksa Nepalese papers with a Japanese stab binding. Wheeee!
