Façades for Mark Rothko
s.l. [Flatrock, Newfoundland]: walking bird press, 2018. Quarto, 31.2 x 22 cm. Cased in blue-gold Asahi cloth over limp boards, with title blocked in blind to the upper cover. Unpaginated [ll. 16, including self-ends]. A fine copy. The text was set by Michael Bixler in Van Djick type, and printed by Tara Bryan on Zerkall Book Laid paper. Maple blocks, cut down to type-height by Ken Holden, were grouped and arranged into grids by Tara Bryan, and then printed monochromatically by her. Together, the arrangements form ‘facades’ which enclose the text. A total of 10 monochrome ‘facades’, each composed with 12 maple blocks, accompany the text. They were printed in wine, yellow, pale green, green, orange, blue, and pale blue. Wine, yellow, and orange were each repeated once. An additional ‘facade’, printed in blue and yellow, forms the frontispiece. It was overprinted with the title, imprint, and date. The title lettering was done by Jerry Kelly. One of 120 unnumbered copies. Item #429
“In the summer of 1999 my wife, our two younger children, and I were driving across the south of England through Sussex, Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, and into Cornwall. It was a brilliant June Day, drenched with sunlight, the heat riven by occasional plosions of sea wind. Somewhere in Dorset we rounded a corner high above the sea, and there laid out below us were two adjacent fields, one bright yellow, the other deep blue. I thought of Mark Rothko.
I have always been struck by sudden correspondences between the natural and the artistic. I don’t mean simply the recognition of natural forms captured in a fine landscape or portrait, but rather formal, structural correspondences between, on the one hand, artistic elements such as colour, line, harmony, melody, poetic cadence, metaphor, and on the other, natural phenomena like flower forms, geological formations, clouds, water, the flights of birds, or the movement of animals. Connections like these seem to me to constitute complementary forms, which when recognized precipitate an aesthetic connection. [… ]
Back to that summer drive, and those two fields. The connection between that landscape and Rothko’s particular compositional forms started the poem.” — Crispin Elsted, from A Note About the Poem
“Thinking of Rothko’s paintings, I wanted the book to have a quiet presence but not be imposing, to contain and present Crispin’s writing without being illustrative. Many ideas came to mind, but they all seemed too imitative or predictable. I thought of Paul Klee’s rhythmic ‘Harmony’ paintings, and kept rereading the poems and looking at Rothko’s work. One day I had a ‘eureka’ moment when I remembered a box of maple blocks left over from a project years ago, and I asked a friend if he could cut them to type-high.
A grid of 12 squares fit on a page, and I sanded 24 blocks to varying degrees, leaving some saw marks, grain, and scratches for texture. Then I mixed ink and proofed and rearranged them until I was happy. The grid is reminiscent of a brick wall in need of mortar, light coming through the cracks and dissolving some of the bricks’ edges. To me, the images suggest façades as well as the quiet internal light of Rothko’s paintings.
I chose colors from the poem and the paintings that inspired it, and I limited the palette, repeating colors with different configurations of blocks to create an enclosure and add something more than mere decoration.” — Tara Bryan.
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