Bliss

I’ve always loved the word bliss. I had a friend who lived on Bliss Street for awhile in Florence, MA. For me, I always associate bliss with

• Biking Bliss
• Printing Bliss
• Running Bliss

Bliss = Flow. I sometimes can even feel my body beginning to enter that state of total and complete concentration and oneness with whatever it is I am doing. I get it most consistently biking, running and art-making. When I get into bliss or flow, I will not hear someone speak to me directly, I am lost in my own little world of wonder and concentration. I can feel my heartbeat slow, and my mind begin to quiet. Since I know what the triggers are–I can make sure I don’t enter bliss when I’m teaching, I joke about it with my students, but it’s serious. I know how I am when I have entered that state and when I’m supposed to be the “one-in-charge” I really should be focused on those for whom I am charged, versus my own work.

What takes you to bliss? And have you entered that state lately? If not, I encourage you to try to make the time to get to it at some point this week. Or at the very least, think about what takes you to that place.

Lately I have entered printing bliss quite consistently. It’s a rush to get into that state. The entry is like having blinders lowered around my eyes, like horse blinders, allowing me to focus every neuron in my body on whatever it is I am doing. Recently it has been the creation of a maze book, a book for my Australian American mail exchange on the theme nucleus. A maze book is a book made from one piece of paper. You strategically cut and fold the paper so that the book folds down into an accordion of sorts. There are all sorts of different ways of making these fold-downs, one-page books, maze books. Pretty much anyone can make one, which is why they are really hard to do well. You’ll see the overall layout of this in the slideshow.

Perhaps you saw my earlier post that got into a bit of the preliminary process. These new images take you through the printing, from the first lock-ups to the last. I am grateful to Antoine, the PRESS BHIP 2013 intern for his help in solving the lock-up “puzzle” and for taking these pictures. You can see more pics from PRESS at our Flickr page.

Here’s the outside of the final book. To get the spacing correct there are 4-EM spaces in between each of the nucleus letters. This is the second printing of the cover. In the first printing I misspelled forest and had not adjusted the spacing. But it was a super happy accident. Why? (Considering this is a maze book and I had already printed the beautiful green circles on one side and the text on the other side–so how could I possibly fix this without starting from square one?) Turns out I had like coaster weight paper that was just the right color. So I printed the corrected title on that, adhered it to the book, and called it a day. That extra firmness to the book gives it just enough stability to make it easier to handle and formalizes the overall piece. I love it!

If you want to see the final piece, you’ll need to wait for the Markings Exhibit that opens in September at PRESS.