Vashon Island Light
Vashon Island Light is my first artist’s book. It’s a personal experiment as well as a unique artwork. The guiding objective was to share some of my most compelling images of light falling upon the rural island where I have lived for 35 years. I’ve organized the book by season. There are also a few pages of text including a brief bio.
The book’s dimensions are 7-in x 10-in. Every page has been hand crafted and assembled. There are thirty pages, including twenty color plates and several text pages.
Each of the plates has been printed by me using a customized pigment inkset. Each plate is signed. All components of the book have been produced using archival materials. The photographic plates are acid-free fine cotton rag paper that have been sprayed to enhance protection from the elements.
As designed, Vashon Island Light is a “flutter book.” Sure, you can engage with it traditionally as a book, turning pages one-by-one. The fun part is that the pages can unfold outwardly. This allows the plates to be displayed upright across a table. If you are brave, it is even possible hold the center pages and let the rest of the book gently unfurl below. This type of design is superb for an art book because you can engage physically with the art and text in multiple ways.
As noted, Vashon Island Light was an artful experiment with multiple goals. One was to begin teaching myself the craft of personal book design. Another was to discover if other people were interested in engaging with this book. As an artist, I tend to live in my head. It can be challenging to obtain feedback about one of your artworks from the buying public.
So to fulfill my own curiosity and to show off a bit, I submitted Vashon Island Light to the Vashon Center for the Arts as my contribution to a significant fund raising event conducted as a silent auction over the period of a month.
I was more than thrilled to see that Vashon Island Light “sold”within ten days for the highest “buy it now” price. I was especially happy that the primary financial beneficiary, Vashon Center for the Arts, got a lot of good out of this personal experiment.
While I’m fully cognizant that auction economics are their own universe, I am motivated to continue happily along this path of offering artist's books. I will share distribution and purchase information when the sales outlets and I are ready to roll.
