An Artist’s Book

This is a handmade artist’s book, one of a kind, in the form of a small folio. The cover is Mexican bark paper, tied with a thin ribbon. On the cover is a line I love from the poet Theodore Roethke:

What shakes the eye but the invisible?

Inside the folio are three hand-painted leaves. I used acrylic and colored pencil on hot press watercolor paper, and then I cut them out. They are alder leaves, inspired by many that litter the ground where I love to walk. In those woods I feel known somehow, with Nature’s pure awareness all around me.

One thing about an artist’s book (and books in general) is that you can’t see it all at once but only as an unfolding experience. The paper opens, you turn a page or turn over a leaf, and the idea grows by moments. If you click on each image here, you can see my simple folio in sequence.

Photos by Art Grice