A Planetary Collage – Timothy C. Ely | drawings, paintings, bookworms, book forms, sketchbooks, bookbindings, lists, poetry, recipes, equipment, book artist and stuff

SCORE (cont.): A Walkthrough of My Book Recently Delivered to the Lilly Library at Indiana University

February 1, 2019 by telyhardware

Last week I posted about my new work, SCORE, delivered to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Today I wanted to share more images from the book in a bit of a guided tour. At the same time the following descriptions offer insight into the music which accompanies SCORE. What is the work? My primary works, like SCORE, start with a set of unique, one-of-a-kind spreads — in the future I’ll visit the process of creating the folios in more […]

Categories: My Work, News • Tags: artist books, bookbinding, modern art

SCORE: New Work Delivered to the Lilly Library at Indiana University

January 25, 2019 by telyhardware

SCORE Graphic Notation and composition: Timothy Ely Music and production: Larry Ellingson In February of 2018, fellow artist Larry Ellingson and I engaged in a non-stop conversation in a car, hurtling through space from the east side to the west side of Washington State, and back. Conversing wildly and led by shared interests topics ranged across brain/mind science, astronomy, history, materials, construction, and art and science in general. At the end of the road trip a collaboration had taken shape: […]

Categories: My Work, News, Working & Methods

Rhizomes, Knives and Thread: Books by a Thousand Cuts (Sketchbooks, Part 3)

December 7, 2018 by telyhardware

Rhizomes are plant stalks which spread underground. Rhizomes mimic artistic growth — we must continuously create space for processes to expand within us until a new stalk pushes up somewhere, surprising us with new growth. This can occur with startling regularity. In my first post about sketchbooks, I briefly addressed the WHY of keeping a sketchbook. In Part 2, I offered some thinking about ink and what the sketchbook has taught me about working with related materials. I am saving […]

Categories: My Work, Working & Methods

Rhizomes, Carbon and Graphite: Contemplations on a Sketchbook, Part 2

October 31, 2018 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

October 16, 2018 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

September 18, 2018 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

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Philip Smith – A Meditation by Timothy C. Ely

August 31, 2018 by telyhardware

In 2016 I was asked to write an introduction to the catalog for an auction of Philip Smith’s work. Given the interest in my prior post about Philip, I’m re-posting what I wrote here. I am a romantic but not prone to great exaggeration. As I have studied deeply the history of books and their making, I think I am in a safe zone in stating that the bindings of Philip Smith are among the finest and most skilled ever […]

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Evolution, Creativity, and Metaphysics

August 27, 2018 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

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OF SCRIPTS AND STARS The Cipheric Aesthetics of Timothy C. Ely’s Cribriform Script by Ian Boyden

August 15, 2018 by telyhardware

It is possible to interpret this confrontation of script and stars. Just as now and then a star emerges from the host—as a moving planet, as a comet—so also does a cipher, whose ideogram becomes intelligible to us, rise up now and then from the heap of incomprehensibility. One could draw the conclusion that the limits of vision correspond to the limits of understanding. —Werner Spies[i] Everything we hear is an echo. Anyone can see that echoes move forward and […]

Categories: My Work, News

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My Artist’s Journey, Part 4: Philip Smith

August 9, 2018 by telyhardware

While in England on my NEA grant, I met Philip Smith – an encounter that spun into a lifelong friendship. Most bookbinding texts focus on journeyman work – the skills needed to begin the process and to contemplate mends, repairs and the conservation of rare works. During my self-propelled apprenticeship I found many books covering these issues in binding – key issues where I was intrigued. Through them I learned a tremendous amount about the raw fundamentals and first principals. […]

Categories: Biography

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