The Altered Book genre is lesser known than many but still an exciting artistic challenge. The book, any book the artists selects, is viewed as material for making something new. Cutouts, over-painting or over-drawing, collage, and many other techniques are all possibilities at this point. My particular bent is poetry, so I alter books by investigating the words, the text, as a way of making something new which still honors what the book is originally set out to do.
Earth From Above, a book of 365 striking aria photographs by Yann Arthus-Bertrand invited me to take on a year-long, on image-a day, book altering project. Each two-page spread in the book comprises a left page of text explaining the location of the photograph in the world with demographic, agricultural, economic or geographic information facing the image on the right page.
I had recently completed building a new letterpress studio and was anxious to begin a daily practice. I intended to complete one image a day fore a full year. Each spread's work involved selecting certain words from the provided text and connecting them, by rivers of color to create a more poetic or evocative text. Each facing image was enhanced with the use of the same architectural color pens used for altering the text.
In truth, life intervened. The idea of doing enough each day, seven days a week, for a full year, was unrealistic. Instead, the project sat on a work table for nearly eight years before it was completed.
