Ken Botnick

Clarence Morgan Sketchbooks

ken — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:35:46 +0000

Clarence Morgan Sketchbooks

Limited edition printed letterpress and Iris 8 × 8 inches 2001, emdash.

This book uses the sketchbooks of a painter as the focus of a conversation about abstraction between the artist and the editor/bookmaker. The pages are made as a kind of “call and response” between the artist and the typographer/publisher. In my role as editor I assembled pages from 5 years of sketchbooks into a visual/verbal narrative on the nature of painting, teaching and making. The pages are structured around three levels of a typographic system visually symbolized by the changes in orientation of the text on the page spreads. Printed on the Iris printing system. This book was the beginning of an investigation into the link of the computer in the production of an artist’s book. 13 copies.

A Defense of the Book

ken — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:32:36 +0000

A Defense of the Book

William H. Gass. 2001 6 × 9 inches, 36 pps.
Limited edition, printed letterpress from photopolymer plates.

There are five sections of this essay that are illuminated by the printer’s initial letters. Covers, shown here, are printed silkscreen on uncoated boards, bound by the printer/publisher with Japanese silk cloth spine. With this title I wanted to further explore the link between the computer and letterpress production which I did by creating initial letters in a three-dimensional design software for the letterforms which open each of the 5 sections of the essay.

Kamini

ken — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:29:31 +0000

Kamini

Selections from Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda
Translated by Andrew Schelling Designed & Printed by Ken Botnick
Selected by the American Institute of Graphic Arts for the 2007 “50 Books/ 50 Covers” exhibition

Emdash is pleased to offer this September, 2007 publication of this new edition of Jayadeva’s 1000-year old songs of love of Krishna and his consort Radha. These translations by noted poet & Sanskrit scholar Andrew Schelling are a departure in tone and content from previous academic translations. Schelling has selected 29 poems from the 12 cantos to reveal a poetry of desire & longing, sprituality & eroticism. Printed in English & Sanskrit, the book, employs 20 blues to capture the various manifestations of Krishna. Eleven images from North India were created by the printer and printed from relief plates. The images act less as illustrations of the poems than they do as an attempt to investigate the duality of male/female relationships, as well as looking into the elusive nature of Lord Krishna. Images printed on the verso first were then “drawn through” onto the front side, or recto, of the sheet by saturating the front side with multiple layers of ink after the initial image was printed. Most images are printed from polymer plates, but the endsheets are printed in multiple shades of blue monoprint. Hand-set Dante type on Bugra paper, 9 3/4 in x 11 3/8 in (upright) 42 printed pages, in an edition of 65 numbered copies, bound in boards covered with Kuzuryu printed papers. Signed by Schelling and Botnick. $800.

Kavya

ken — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:25:15 +0000

Kavya

Poems from North India Spanish translation by Octavio Paz, English by Eliot Weinberger.
Photographs by Nina Subin. 8.5 × 8.5 inches, 39 pps.
Inkjet and letterpress printing.

I had worked with Paz, Weinberger and Subin once before on a broadside, “The Face and the Wind” a poem by Paz from his time in India. The broadside had a beautiful print of a photograph by Subin from a series of images she had made in India. In the intervening years inkjet technology had made printing fine quality photographs in limited edition books more accessible. This group of poems was originally translated from the Sanskrit into Spanish by Paz during his stay in India as cultural attaché, and translated into English here by Weinberger. Each page spread has the poem represented in the original Sanskrit, Spanish and English, in different arrangements and forms. The intention is to subvert the expectations of the presentations of translated poetry, and, to that end, neither English nor Spanish predominates on the page. Subin’s 9 photographs are interspersed with drawings of traditional Indian design motifs in multiple colors. 45 in the edition. $750.

After Some Time

ken — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:19:22 +0000

After Some Time

One in a suite of 7 prints

This project is a collaboration between Ken Botnick and Diana Guerrero-Macia, as a response to traveling in India together in 2008. Each print takes inspiration from an idiom or popularized piece of language found on signboards, trucks, or matchboxes. Inspired by the sign painters of India we allowed some play to occur between the letterforms that are typographic and those that are hand drawn. Colors and forms were abstracted through a process that reduced and distilled the visual intensity found in the streets of India. At times a kind of virtual collage was added through scanned bits of wrappers and fabric picked up along the way. There are 10 copies of 7 prints each, printed inkjet and letterpress, in a printed paper envelope.