What’s in a Book? – A Deeper Dive into the Monograph Radiant Echoes

Books are wildly intimate things. I’ve been obsessed with them since before I could read. Within the covers their words and images promise us new worlds of meaning and inspiration. Books can be funnels: small openings that lead into larger spaces. From the moment I open one, I sense an unfolding that draws me into a portal that expands my sense of time.

Creating books, however, has an opposite effect. Imagine starting at the open end of the funnel and having to compress all the information that narrows to the opening. Not everything fits, or at least not the way I first arrange things. Those first rounds of decisions always feel the messiest, as if I’ve thrown all the information up in the air and it lands all over my studio floor, which sometimes, it literally does. Crafting books positively consumes time and space, like a giant project teetering over the edge of a black hole’s event horizon. I have ridden that event horizon’s edge with so many book projects that I’ve authored or edited.

But before there could be the new monograph Radiant Echoes with 5 authors writing about my artwork, I had to select the artwork that would go into my accompanying retrospective. It took a month of digging through my own digital and print archives to narrow down what was in and what was not. Sometimes, the decision was based solely on the available photographs and how they would look in print. – Old scans of old 35 mm slides don’t always hold up to that scrutiny.

I spent another 3 months adding or updating each artwork’s details into my Artwork Archive database, which digitally drives the exhibition’s virtual “gallery rooms.” Previously, I’d believed I’d kept good records…Well, they’re good now…At least for the pieces that I included in the retrospective.

During the selection process, when I hit 92 pieces, I knew 100 was my limit. When I’d find more photos, or regret not including a piece because I couldn’t cope with the digital restoration conversion of a small, low res image into something printable, I’d tell myself that, as a number, 100 has an elegant symmetry, but 101 would be way over the top.

The 100 selected pieces represent approximately 12% of the total metalwork I have created in 35 years, less than 8% of the total body of my artwork.

And then, there was the book’s design…

I own over 1000 art and design books, which makes me not only a bibliophile, it makes me a book-snob. My editor Emily Zilber and I agreed from the beginning that I’d only be happy with the result if I had creative control over Radiant Echoes’ design. This is the eighth book project in which I have done at least part of the design and layout, but this monograph is completely different. Giving Voice’s layout was predetermined by the original manuscript. All the technical books and ebooks I’ve written or edited followed the flow of steps and corresponding photos. Radiant Echoes is a macro display of the endless details of my legacy. There was no ‘wrong’ way to go about it, but there were an infinite number of good, better, even better, and ‘yes!’ options that slowed the pace and often left me satisfied, but thoroughly drained and exhausted day after day at my Mac.

Getting all the details from Artwork Archive into InDesign was a mere copy/paste job…over 700 times as calculated by the following

Book Layout Math:

• (“Command + C,” switch from Artwork Archive in a Safari tab to Adobe InDesign + “Command + V,” switch back from Adobe InDesign to Artwork Archive in the Safari tab) x ~700 = ~2800 clicks.
• Click back and forth between tabs and apps as I remembered to check off that an artwork’s caption was complete in my master list in Notion.
• Forget where I was in which app and click around 2-5 more times to get back to where I meant to be, which = feeling completely goofy
• Book design = decision fatigue.
• I went to art school because they said there would be no math.
• Book design also = thousands of micro-decisions on the design itself. For example It took two and a half days to find and select fonts that worked with the images.

More than all that mousework, was a wholistic framing of my career.

Once I was happy with the overall design, I averaged laying out two page spreads per day. None were more difficult than the four essays by the book’s contributors. The essays themselves drove the decision to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically, because magically, each essay uniquely fit well with a particular collection. Still, work that is sequentially collaborative carries with it a pressure to do illustrative justice to others’ insights.

Over three decades of working in historical and highly specialized techniques makes my work ripe for technical questions, and I’ve always been quite happy to answer them. Unfortunately, I found it challenging to bust out of the safer realm of tech-talk and hadn’t always gotten as many questions about the personal experiences and inspirations from which I dream up these objects in metal. The story of how a board game changed the course of my life is easy enough to share, but bringing together the threads of music, nature, architecture, cosmology, magic, history, and mortality does not lead to a short answer. It has however, ultimately led to a book of which I’m extremely proud.