Visions: A Hand Bound Book of Drawings and Paintings: 1976 - 1988

Leather bound; 21 pages: January 22, 1976 – April 8, 1988. 10” x 6 1/2”. Watercolor; pencil; colored pencil; pen and ink; and collage on white, slightly deckled-edged artists’ paper.

This book, beautifully bound in soft leather by Laurette Carroll, was a gift from her that inspired some of my finest work in this period of my visual art. Its twenty one pages comprise a gallery of small art works bound in a book.

It is contemporary with my “Variations “, and continues with themes and subjects treated in that hand bound book: works in a Surrealist mode (7 pages); Cubist-inspired pieces; and a number of still life renderings.

Although the individual pages vary in subjects, there is continuity in the techniques, and in sensibilities, from the place in my mind that runs through the collection.

I have to think that it would not be possible for me to return to exactly this same place, the source of this precise mode and mood of expression. The inception of my two-decades-plus book era in 1986 made it necessary for me to leave behind art work in the trajectory evoked in these twenty one pages.

I have the intention of moving along on my later paths (works inspired by the Russian Avant-garde, e. g.). At the same I have a strong desire to go back and take up the themes and subjects expressed here again in my future work.

A favorite German compound word comes to mind: fernweh. It is composed of “fern”: “far, distant”; and “wehe”: “ache, sickness”. It applies essentially to landscape, a “distance sickness”.

It carries the longing to go back to a place remembered, or to return to a place one has never been to. It could be a place that isn’t somewhere tangible, or may not even exist.

I experience fernweh by any definition in terms of landscapes I have lost, landscapes I am ever seeking to find. But it also comes to me with places in the mind and heart.

As with my hand bound book “Landscapes”, I think of “Visions…” as a work of art more applicable to acquisition by an art archive; a museum dedicated to such works; collector of one of a kind books, or any agent specifically interested in books of an artist’s original work, than as a component of an archive per se.

I would be interested in discussing possibilities for a purchase from any institution or individual. Price $12,000.00