I'm testdriving Joplin for the more structured “projects and tasks” part of note taking. Can sync through Nextcloud. Nextcloud seems to be offered more often as a specific syncing option besides the usual dropboxes and iclouds etc.
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Sold another couple of bird prints this week. Only four left of the Blue tit and the House sparrow. Working on a design for the Jay. I think I solved the problem of that finely striped black and blue patch on its wings.
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Started reading Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar. Only at the introduction so far, but already some beatiful, meaningful and incisive phrases. “All creation is collective, emergent and relational.” “The endless, ceaselessly changing weave of life on which all life depends.”
Goldfinch, organisational knowledge management and that remarkable absence of the true representation of nature
It was the week of snow and cold and ice in The Netherlands. I walked instead of cycled to the studio each day. Takes a bit longer of course, but those 25 minutes are good for switching the home/work/home contexts.
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Finished the edition of twenty of the European goldfinch print. The first two have already been sold as well. Cool, it turned out well indeed. Graphically a very interesting bird with clearly marked areas of color. Not one to start out with, but at thirty designs in, it was time to tackle this one.
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I sent out the first actual newsletter with printmaking updates to my small list of subscribers. In dutch, but it you're so inclined, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page.
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Besides illuminated intials and margin decorations and illustrations, there's also the numerous patterns medieval book illuminators used for filling solid areas of color/space. Here's another example. Want to start catalogueing these in some way, or find out whether that's been done already.
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Mister George Charles Williamson wrote this sentence in 1911 for the entry on miniature painting in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and it captures very well what I find so fascinating about medieval imagery: “Landscape, such as it was, soon became quite conventional, setting the example for that remarkable absence of the true representation of nature which is such a striking attribute of the miniatures of the middle ages.“
Using this preliminary reading list on Medieval illumination, I scoured the online inventories of second hand book stores and had a few books sent my way. And so I've been reading up on the history of the book, codex, manuscript. It makes for fascinating reading and looking. Seeing the endless combinations of script, drawing and decoration unfold within the new format of the page (papyrus rolls were the standard in Antiquity) is a uniquely medieval innovation in the visual arts.
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Some of the short blurbs I write that go with my instagram posts want to be expanded upon as blog posts. Just like the items I write in these here week notes. So many threads, always more to weave.
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Collage is one of the topics I did not get to expand upon in the Bildung 1 zine. Collages can be funny, weird, disturbing, all of the above at the same time. It's definitely a way of image making that is dear to me. Funny: cats of brutalism.
Calligraphy, printing things from the web & digital self-care
Much of the week involved finishing up my part of a new (art) zine exhibition @gahilversum. Keep an eye on that instagram account. As part of that I'm experimenting with calligraphy (again). Medieval Calligraphy by Marc Drogin is the go to for the how to. I find a certain style of decoration fascinating, in which the versals (decorated capital letters) get these very long and thin lines extending along the margins of the text block (example). My own initial explorations of this are in Calligraphic Space Ⅲ.
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“naming your files and figuring out your digital organizational structure is self-care” – @johngold. One of the replies calls for “more binder clip hacks”. I’ve been using my own version of a hipster PDA the last few weeks. Mostly because I promised myself to never try, let alone pay for, an online task manager ever again.
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This makes me want to play around with the cliché's in our collection. (can't find what the English word is for the metal plates that contain engraved illustrations for letterpress, in Dutch they're called cliché's)
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Naming my abstract prints is hard. Sometimes a cool word seems to suggest a characteristic that resonates. Manifold, for example. Not exactly what I was looking for, but I remember seeing thesecrocheted manifolds in Helsinki some years ago.
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On publishing: the main job last week was wrapping up my new zines and sending those to the printer. Now to reflect on the proces and get ready to share bits and pieces. More soon.
I put the zines together using mostly open source tools. Scribus for page layout. For photo editing a la photoshop, there's GIMP, but it's very clunky. Glimpse improves on it considerably.
Working on my zines. A 21st century European Bauhaus? Snow fight!
Nick Sousanics maps out a selection of books as a reservoir from which to derive his own course contents. I did a similar thing last year as a way to take inventory of topics and inspirations for my own artistic production. It's become the main structure behind one of the zines I'm finishing up. More on that once those are done.
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I'm using a selection of blog posts I wrote on here over the last year. It's super interesting to see how those small pieces of writing connect with the visual work I produced.
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Spent quite some time this week sorting brass lines in type cases and books in the library of the GAH printmaking studio. Making time for the mind to do its own background processing. Quite the week, huh.
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Get your dragons here*. I'm partial to this particular style of book illustrations. The motifs in the border, the double outlines around the ears, the highlights around neck, hooves and over all stylized representation. Even more decorative motifs on this silver engraved panel.
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More medieval goodies: the Vatican is digitizing its library: https://digi.vatlib.it/. Good resources for the calligraphic explorations I'm currently working on. Started re-reading Maerlants Wereld.
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About those silver engravings, this is where the intaglio/etching technique has it's roots. At some point someone found out that if you rub an engraved plate like that with ink, then remove it again from the top surface, this leaves ink only in the grooves of the engraving. If you then put a piece of paper over it and press really hard, the image on the plate gets transferred to the paper.
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A beautiful web essay on easy to create newsletters and hard to build websites. Ease of use for creation, ease of discovery for consumption and straightforward payment options are all available for email, less so for websites. “Instead, I see the web as this public good that’s been hijacked by companies trying to sell us mostly heartless junk.” But it could still be done and would still be worthwhile. I.e. here's a service that turns a folder with files into a blog: https://blot.im/. RSS could still be the browser's built-in notification system for new content. Payments still need work.
Started following @typographica on the twitter this week. Started looking at some of the serif fonts reviewed there. Brabo looks very nice*. Equity has been my workhorse serif so far. Brabo would make a good addition, a bit roomier and with more flair. Pensum is nice too, but I can't get past that lowercase e.
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Somehow really glad about the happy ending of the Queens Gambit, which we watched with the whole family.
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Still listening to “Awakening from the meaning crisis” lectures by John Vervaeke. Periodic reminder to use huffduffer to turn youtube videos into your own curated podcast.
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