For the last several years, in addition to my job as a graphic designer I have been working behind the scenes on my own art practice. Last Christmas I decided to pull together the dozen or so self portraits I had made around 2012 into a small book form. I have been thinking about accessibility to art in terms of who gets to make it and who gets to consume it, and what are the impacts of all those things.
This lead me to create a paperback book which I consider a very accessible vehicle of communication, that I could sell without incurring any production costs by using Amazon’s publication platform KDP Direct, which I am familiar with due to my work as a book designer. About 4 years in to my becoming a Facebook devotee I began to feel very uneasy about the time I was spending there. I had been early in my career a prolific sender of hand printed letterpress promotional postcards. When Facebook came along somehow that activity was seriously put aside in favor of what seemed possible via social media. I saw it change in those early days and morph into what it is today. I have also seen how people feel about it change from harmless social tool to a democracy crushing media outlet. So I thought a lot about the digital tools we are bombarded with and considered how to use them to my best advantage. I got back to life drawing in 2012 around the same time of these paintings. I began to understand that my fractured but growing attention to social media and the internet in general were not serving me and so I set out to change that, and this book is part of that change.
The 24 page book is available on Amazon as an e-book and a full color paper back. View it here.
Tags: artists books, workspace