Tag: Thornapple Press

“What do you know about that time, I ask.”

theresakishkan4 Comments

After what feels like an obligatory delay in arrival (note left by courier on neighbour’s locked gate, several phone calls to clarify our location, courier promising to come the next day but missing the ferry, and finally coming up our driveway last evening as we were eating dinner), anyway, after that small drama, my copies of my new book arrived! The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. I love everything about it: the size, sort of hand-sized and discrete; the cover (hardback, printed on a canvas-y material to replicate a painting); the endpaper; the beautiful page layouts; and, in truth, the actual story it tells, one I took nearly half a century to meet on its own terms, to parse. If you visit the book’s page on this site, you can read recent reviews, news of events, and so on.

If you live on the Sechelt Peninsula, you can help me celebrate its publication on May 29, the actual publication date (though books will be finding their way into bookstores and libraries over the next few weeks), at the Sechelt Library from 1-2:30. I’ll be bringing cake! The wonderful Talewind Books will have copies available for sale and John printed letterpress keepsakes to tuck into them, though quantities are limited, due to the nature of letterpress printing. I will happily mail copies to those of you who buy copies in your own communities too. Just let me know.

This was a difficult book to write but I’m glad I met the gaze of the painting in the stairwell of our home, the portrait of me at 23, and I’m glad she and I made our peace with each other. It’s become part of my life’s archive — the painting itself, my feelings about it, changing as I changed over the years, and what it meant to reread the huge stack of letters from the artist who painted it. Who painted me, clothed and unclothed, who made me the centre of a story I was reluctant to occupy. And now the book is here, with its conversations and meditations and, oh, all the feelings.

She looks at me, fixed for eternity by the gaze of a male painter. Or actually, she looks beyond me. But she knows I’m standing near the bottom of the stairs, hoping for a sign. What do you know about that time, I ask. What should I have done differently? You opened the envelope, she reminds me. You took those courses in Greek mythology. You knew what a pithos was. It was a jar, I remind her, not an envelope. Let’s not quibble about etymology, she murmurs.

…the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full.1

There were nights I walked from my apartment on Fort Street through the dark streets to the sea. What did I want, what did I hope for? That somehow everything would be as it was before I entered the gallery and saw myself, a version of myself, on a wall, wearing a hat. Was it red or was it green, and why don’t I remember? I—you—were wearing a hat. From that moment, I became the object of an older man’s gaze, in which he took me in, every part of my body, and put it on canvas with paints thinned with turpentine. A jar emptied of everything but hope. What did I hope for? (Can you remember?) His brushes were exquisite. (Sometimes you imagined them stroking your actual skin, not what emerged from tubes of pigment—mostly red and yellow, a little blue, softened with white; but sometimes the skin was olive, sometimes lit as though from within, soft butter yellow and pink.)

1 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica.

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter (Julia Kristeva)

theresakishkan2 Comments

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 77.) 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.