by Tara Bryan | Jan 13, 2013 | Artist book, bread, Uncategorized |
This is the painting for the bomb side of Making Bread (not bombs). The brilliant Ray Fennely photographed it in sections (the original is almost 7 feet long) and spliced the sections back together.Now I am dropping out text and cutting it apart again to fit the template for laser cutting the sections, and I am beginning to see a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel! The other explosion paintings may become book covers or pages for other books. Later. I have almost completed a spreadsheet of countries of the world (234 of them) with names of their traditional breads and time zones so they can be sorted. Maps of Mesopotamia and Iraq, and snippets of text from various sources will tie up the package. The logistics of printing and laser cutting, determined by the idiosyncrasies of the machines, have been, um, fascinating to work out. The patient and jovial Ken Holden has helped me produce Corel Draw files that the laser cutter will be happy with. And so the project progresses at a slow burn. (I’m hoping this week I’ll finally be IN the tunnel!)...
by Tara Bryan | Feb 10, 2012 | Al-Mutanabbi, BookArtObject, books, bread, creative process, progress |
I seem to be genetically incapable of working on one thing at a time, so I am researching and pondering 2 book projects and stretching canvases for new paintings, as other ideas dance like sugar plums in the back of my mind. My commitment (last year) to make a book for Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here has been an exercise in what I don’t want it to be, and I have spent a year thinking, reading, looking at other books, and being stymied. It wasn’t until I signed up for another group project, Book-Art-Object, that a concept arose that seemed to fit, and, I hope, will merge the two commitments into one book. The title I chose for BAO is Making Bread. I started thinking about Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, the Fertile Crescent as the breadbasket, all information stuck in my head in 7th grade Geography class. And then, Baghdad as a focus of high culture and the irony of moving from heights of intellectual creativity to fear and fundamentalist intolerance. Now I am reading histories of bread and writing in my journal about having grown up in an intellectually curious extended family amid fear-instilling radio and television news reports of the Cold War, Viet Nam, and myriad civil wars, genocides, famines around the world. Man’s unimaginable inhumanity to fellow man, but not in my neighborhood. I started making bread in High School, as my Sunday morning meditative replacement for going to church, and as a way to connect with the millions of people who make bread around the planet (yes, I was an aspiring Hippy). I have added...
FLATROCK, NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA
Painter and Book Artist