Open Books

In remembered the Codex Zouche Nuttall and also the Egyptian hieroglyphs I imagined a text without words, an open book with lines of objects that were positioned in such a way that they became the text to a lost civilization.

The Open Books series is perhaps the simplest format that I have discovered. It was an invention from my graduate days at UC Davis. Having a habit since I was a child of collecting found objects from streets, discarded trash and everywhere, I came into grad school with boxes of small objects that although they were interesting in and of themselves, I had a need to use them in my work.

From this beginning, I have made open books for thirty years. An open book is an inviting format as opposed to an ordinary diptych, but like a diptych, that has two images side by side, the viewer is compelled to understand the relationship. But unlike a two paneled painting, an open book has two ideas that are captives in the format of the idea of a bound book. An open book is a ready-made of information and a blank canvas for anything including abstract juxtapositions that have nothing to do with each other.

The thing that is different between this body of work and from others that I am involved with, is that the open book series is actually more of a brainstorming device and becomes largely a ceramic sketchpad where work out random and cathartic expressions that may evolve into other bodies of work. Regarding absolute freedom, the book series has no limits in terms of its content.

My recent works of this series are diverse in scale, much like books can come in any size. The scale suggests the sense of sound, like small intimate books that are whispers and very large books that carry a grand importance with the projection of an opera singer! Pieces such as, The Book of Exile, is of a scale that reminds one of an Illuminated manuscript with one side reminiscent of the medieval decorative script found in a Book of Hours. While the other side is a wild and out of control abstraction that protrudes with intestinal action, drippy and aggressive, and yet somehow the left illustrates the right while the right tells the true story of what is hidden behind the decorated propriety of the left.