books published |
AFTER IMAGE
By Barbara Hodgson & Claudia Cohen
|
The second volume in Barbara Hodgson and Claudia Cohen's colour series, following 2007's The Temperamental Rose & Other Ways of Seeing Colour. Inspired by Renaissance thinkers, Victorian children's book creators, Russian avant-gardists, and German applied artists, the authors have created a three-dimensional playground of 16 models and assemblages that can be moved, folded, shifted and spun.
"Ambitious readers can assemble a three-dimensional icosahedron, a twenty-sided polyhedron that shows the full spectrum in pure hues, tints and shades. As well, the materials and instructions for folding an intricate modular star in six colours are provided. A spinning top is included to use with a series of coloured disks, to demonstrate the principles of colour mixing. The disks have been created to stand in for the original Maxwell disks, used in late nineteenth-century schoolrooms to introduce children to the marvels of colour. The spinning top can also be used as a support for the phenakistoscope disk provided. This disk, a variation of that first created in the 1830s, is a precursor of the zoetrope and other cinematic constructions... "Taking 'play' one more step, we have also devised several unexpected partnerships. Euclid joins with the Bauhaus to geometrically demonstrate Wassily Kandinsky's belief that shapes have natural colour associations. And to carry Kandinsky's research even further, we have included an updated version of his postcard questionnaire, to be filled in and returned to us. Other partnerships include applying the colour studies of Russian avantgarde artist Mikhail Matiushin to a Victorian children's moving book construction and adapting a 1920s flower planning guide to a Pacific coast garden."From the Introduction to After Image Printing of After Image was completed in the fall of 2008 by David Clifford at Black Stone Press. The two authors then spent more than three months working through the hundreds of hours of hand colouring, folding and assembling required for the edition of 30 (plus 5 AP) copies. This new volume is significantly more complicated in structure than the first volume, including various things that spin, assemble and pop out. After Image - written, designed and set by Barbara Hodgson - is uniform in format to The Temperamental Rose (8vo, 40 pages). It was printed in two colours with polymer plates on Arches watercolour and handmade papers, and bound in half leather with gold tooling over paste papers by Claudia Cohen. Each copy comes in a clamshell box, along with a three-dimensional construction made from a design by papermaker Reg Lissel on Lissel's own coloured handmade paper, and a hand-lathed wood spinning top required for several of the constructs. All titles in the colour series will be limited to 30 signed and numbered copies, with the first eight copies forming a deluxe issue. In addition to an original sketch page, the deluxe copies of After Image include a multi-hued booklet made from translucent Cromatica papers with patterns cut into the papers to produce an extensive palette, as the effect of overlayering of the various colours changes with each turn of the page. After Image was fully subscribed prior to publication. Return to list of books published. HEAVENLY MONKEY |
    |