Christmas Presence
What a strange book! Got Audrey Niffenegger's The Three Incestuous Sisters as a gift. It's about 3 sisters, a lover, a baby, hair, birds, flying, loss, death, rivalry, etc., told with captions to some of the most beautiful and eerie prints I've seen. You can learn a lot from these pages.

Audrey is also the author of the Time Traveler's Wife, a book without pictures, and very good and also odd, and is one of the best printmakers around.

The last time I was down to Printworks (with a friend who often buys art from them), Sid showed us one of the ten originals of this book (going for less than 15 bucks on Amazon hardcover -- an insane price for a volume now in museums, at the time priced cheaply at 20 thou).

"Here," he said, lifting the heavy volume up to my face. "Smell it."

It smelled like tooled leather and handmade paper. It looked like one of the fat padded family bibles I inherited, and is one of the most lovely objects I've ever seen.

Each of the sister's sections is printed on different tinted paper (blond, blue, pinkish red, the colors of their hair) with hand-colored aquatints mounted on each page, hand-set text facing.

The different colors of paper didn't carry over to the glossy printed edition (unfortunately), but otherwise the reproduction of the prints is flawless, if you've seen her originals. (Printworks's fall season opened with her show this year.)

I don't think any of the individual etchings are available any longer -- they were going for only $400 each at one point.

Weather continues mild for winter, so will go for a walk.

For those who have asked about the little Christmas painting in the corner, no, it's not for sale. I did it a half-dozen years ago from memory of the house we lived in when I was a child and forgot about until I decided to decorate the blog for xmas.

Since it used to be a tradition in my family to take down the xmas tree during the Super Bowl, it may be up for awhile.

Tho if the Bears make it, we'll all be too rivetted to the set to do any work, won't we?
- posted by Cynthia @ 12:11 PM | | | Link |