Across The Bridge Soup
by telyhardware
On soup, oil, starch, and paste.
Categories: Mastery, My Work • Tags: baking, bindery, book-binding, bookbinding, bread, food, paste, paste making, Wheat paste
Category Archives: Mastery
Book Review: Richard Horton’s “Sewings Workshop Guide, with 9 Exercises”
by telyhardware
I received The Gibson System for the Guitar, carrying a copyright of 1939, when I began to take guitar lessons in 1960. This excellent foundation built my understanding and my skills. It focused on the fundamentals that mattered so well that it has value today. On the other hand, my family camped every few years. Of course, when we skipped years we forgot how to “do” camping. My grandfather’s tent must have been Civil War surplus and weighed more than […]
Categories: Mastery, Working & Methods
The Codex Offers Unusual Depths to Explore
by telyhardware
I create books in a most common historic form — the Codex. Of course there are many forms which can be bracketed between the earliest gatherings of written material to something written last month. But this is the form which reaches me as a maker. The primeval forms of scrolls and stones and tablets remain venerable and inspiring. They can provide stimulus for so-termed book artists. Yet the codex remains uniquely compelling for me — a fit basis of my […]
Categories: Mastery, My Work, Working & Methods • Tags: artist books, bookbinding, manuscript books, modern art, one of a kind books, Timothy C. Ely
SCALE
by telyhardware
It began with a question of ‘’How large should I make my book?’’ My student felt the question absurd but really there are no absurd questions. I told her of many successful experiences and missteps with scale. What does it mean to make something of any size? We were specifically referring to sketchbooks and I have reasons for why my preferred size works. Many are practical while not a few are eccentric… like how mine all are designed to fit a […]
Categories: Mastery, My Work, Working & Methods
The Right Triangle
by telyhardware
I don’t think celebrate is the right word for what I’m thinking today — perhaps deeply acknowledge is better? Regardless, I am aware of the anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon along with my departure for the CIA a month or so later. In the middle of all this, in 1969 I had my first solo exhibition in Snohomish Washington, where I grew up. The exhibition came through a series of the wild attractions which have […]
Thoughts On Process: The Impact of PanPastel Colors from Colorfin
by telyhardware
The books and drawings that I make are, I am told, eccentric. I make them using archaic techniques and using tools for industrial or architectural design. The resulting drawings create their own category. It is difficult to ascertain with precision just what is is going on — which is my intent. (All art benefits from a little mystery.) My drawings begin from a small plan about the size of a business card and expand to fill the format of a […]
Categories: Mastery, Working & Methods
Rhizomes, Carbon and Graphite: Contemplations on a Sketchbook, Part 2
by telyhardware
It will be 50 years since Donn E. Trethewey told me that “if I wanted to be an artist, I would have to draw everyday.’’ That was on October 26, 1968. I was 19 years old going on 11. I have been lucky to have a friend in Donn since that time. He also told me about adding glycerine to my gouache to make it appear flat as if screen printed. Lovely. Between Don’s admonition and Imus’s assignment discussed in […]
Categories: Mastery, Working & Methods
Rhizomes and Ink: Contemplations on a Sketchbook, Part 1
by telyhardware
In my first drawing class in college in 1967, my instructor said either “always carry a sketchbook” or “always keep a sketchbook.” I don’t know if anyone else in Keith Imus’s Drawing 101 paid much attention, but I did. Over the past 50 plus years sketchbooks have developed into a most potent device for learning. It is a discipline at the crux of my professional life. Discipline In that first year drawing course, Mr. Imus made it part of our […]
Categories: Mastery, Working & Methods
Building New Books and the Challenge of Repairing Old Ones
by telyhardware
I came upon the following bothersome quote from Matthew Crawford. (Despite thoroughly enjoying the book, no author is perfect.) “Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from building things from scratch. The mechanic and the doctor deal with failure every day, even if they are expert, whereas the builder does not. This is because the things they fix are not of their own making, and are therefore never known in a comprehensive or absolute way. This experience […]
Categories: Mastery, Working & Methods
Evolution, Creativity, and Metaphysics
by telyhardware
“Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well,” wrote Oliver Sacks in outlining the three essential elements of creativity, adding: “This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own.” In essence creativity is not a thing. It has no mass or weight, meaning it must be a metaphysical discharge. It can be seen as the […]
Categories: Mastery, My Work, Working & Methods
A Planetary Collage - Timothy C. Ely 