The Falcon

5-3/8″ x 3-3/8″ x 1-5/8″ (closed book)

Eastern repousse bound, one of a kind, long stitch book, hand lettered with stick inks and mixed media over Arches watercolor paper that has been printed with digitally manipulated montages of original collages and drawings

Ancient alchemists sought to transmute the plain into the precious. My modern day version of that quest similarly seeks to transform the simple into the complex, the mundane into the beautiful, the ordinary into the unique. This book exemplifies the merging of many techniques into a single inseparable form in paradoxic contrast to the chaos of the text, William Butler Yeats’ politically charged poem “The Second Coming.”

I hand lettered the this text over a multi-layered archival montage of my original collages and drawings. The salient image for me from this poem is in the line “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” I wanted the viewer to catch only a glimpse of the wing of this marvelous creature bursting forth from the cover as if flying out of the book and out of control, named but no longer tamed.

The Falcon is featured in Lark Book’s 500 Handmade Books, Vol 2, juried by Julie Chen, page 214.