Today I am going to cut out 70 small squares of unbleached cotton. I’ll starch the cotton before cutting (I found a tin of spray starch on the shelves above the washing machine, never used…). And then I will paint some lines on each little square. They will be fastened — glue and a single stitch — on the keepsakes John printed to celebrate the upcoming publication of my memoir, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze; these will be handed out at readings to those who purchase the book and I will also mail them to people who let me know they’ve bought my book.
Letterpress printing is an interesting process. The type is set, one letter at a time, in a small device called a composing stick. One letter after another until a word is made, a sentence, a paragraph, eventually a book (if that’s your intention). You set the type upside down, nick to the top. The blocks of type are placed carefully in an iron frame called a chase on a perfectly level surface — ours is a piece of marble we bought from a monumental works in Victoria — and the extra space is filled with with wooden furniture. Everything is locked into place using wedge-shaped quoins — you can see 2 of those in the upper part of the photograph, along with the key used to tighten them.
The printing is done on a 19th century Chandler & Price platen press we bought 46 or 47 years ago. Our press is treadle-driven, meaning that the printer peddles with the right foot, adjusting speed and pressure to suit the process. Ink is placed on an inking disk, rollers run over the disk, then they ink the type in the chase, and when the printer feels everything is ready to go, he or she pulls a lever that allows paper to meet the type. The type is impressed into the surface of the paper by the pressure of the meeting.
There are always little glitches. This time, an unexpected one: the typeface chosen to print the little keepsake only had a single 2 in the size the text was set in. And the date of the publication? 2026. So a line had to be removed, reset in a larger size. Luckily it was the name of the publisher — Thornapple Press — so it made sense to bump up the font size, give the name extra weight. Always glitches, because the equipment is old, the process is old, and things go wrong. (We’d hoped for 100 copies and, well, we ended up with 70.) But I couldn’t be happier with the results.
These will make excellent bookmarks! And imagine them with a tiny canvas in that space you can see. That’s what I’ll be doing this weekend.
This is a book that was difficult to write. In a way, I wish I had just ignored the pile of letters I found in a filing cabinet and the various other materials I’d stored with them. Re-reading this stuff made me realize that the story I’d told myself and others about a relationship with a painter when I was 23 and he was in his 50s wasn’t the whole story. It was meeting the eyes of the young woman whose portrait hangs in the stairwell of my home that gave me the courage to settle in for the work of learning the art of looking back. And it was an unsettling year and a half, the time it took to write a draft. I found someone to talk about it with, a wise and patient woman who listened and asked questions, as I asked questions of her, of my younger self, and of the other paintings of me in our house. I’m grateful now to have done this work because I learned things and I’ve given up some of the shame I carried, often buried so deep I forgot it was there. How it occasioned unintended behaviours, patterns. The epigraph for the book is from Julia Kristeva’s extraordinary essay, “Stabat Mater”: Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. It’s particularly aligned with one painting referenced in my book, a painting I never knew existed until I was told about it, a painting of me in which I am holding a scarf or veil over my head. Words were what I had, have, to make peace with the young woman I was.
Turn, I will ask the young poet with flowers in her hair, you who have kept a certain privacy for decades, watching me descend the stairs, you who also watched me climb them, weary or joyous or lost in thought. I carried sorrow up the stairs and down them too. I felt your gaze in the ascent and the descent. Watch me. Watch me open my hands, releasing the shame I carried, hidden mostly but always a weight, an unnecessary guilt. I took off my clothes and I am commemorated with Cadmium Yellow lightened with Flake White, Alizarin Crimson, Prussian Blue, Viridian, Chrome Green. The warm light shimmering with Titanium Buff, Yellow Ochre. My hair, Thalo Blue, Thalo Green, Alizarin Crimson, Indian Yellow, underlayered with transparent yellow. On the Irish island, I walked on the rocks in grey mist and wrapped my arms around my body to contain myself. “Let a body venture at last.” At last I am at least unwrapping the veil, shaking the words from its fine gauze. What happens next, happens.
Such a painstaking process it’s a miracle there were (are, in your case) books and newspapers.
I’ve been looking at my past a lot lately and feeling some shame and chagrin but easily letting most of it up and out and away. Younger and more foolish was I! and I fear not much smarter now sometimes. It’s humbling.
You’ve made art out of your memories. I dont seem to know how to do that.
Kate
It’s good (and healthy!) to let shame go. I had difficulty but then also some excellent help! And writing for me has always been a way to puzzle through the knots of emotion, memory, hoarded grief, and (as it turns out) shame and guilt. I feel lucky in that respect though it wasn’t easy.
Oh yes, printing was and is truly painstaking work. I’ve been old photographs of press rooms or print shops with many presses, all going at once. We think ours was a newspaper press for a time. It has a very large bed and could print large pages. We also have a very small tabletop press, better for business cards and small jobs. It could have done this project but our daughter borrowed it for some projects of her own.