Dear Liza,
Saturday was drizzly and cold but there was lots of warmth in the SideStreet Arts gallery…folks chatting and smiling, having delicious snacks and drinks, and looking at the wonderful art.
This weekend the gallery celebrated January as Print Month, with a show featuring work from fifteen different artists. This is the gallery where Auntie Bridgett shows her work, and I love visiting it. I got to talk with some of the artists!
Poppy Dully creates her prints on actual old books. She noticed me walking around her display and we had a nice chat. I asked her about her work. She said she has made forty of these wonderful pieces in ten years, and her process for each is the same:
She starts with a book that interests her, sometimes recommended by a friend and sometimes the book just leaps out from the shelf. She looks for good vintage books and checks to see if there has been a film adaptation. She reads the book and researches the film. She watches the film to find the images she wants to illustrate each turning point of the story, photographing and sketching as she goes.
She then takes the book apart, applies her oil based monotype prints to the pages, and puts the books back together in an accordion fashion, using the original book cover. These can be displayed open on a bookcase, or read by flipping the pages.
Loving old books, movies, and prints as much as I do, I was fascinated. I kept walking around the display, reading Beauty and the Beast and Beckett and loving what she did with them.
Besides art, we talked about being women of a certain age, of needing to reinvent yourself after retirement, and of finding new wrinkles in literature. It was a great conversation and I feel like I have made a new friend.
Love,
Grandma Judy
Dear Liza 