A conservation case from Mexico.

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There is very good to say goodbye to the holidays with a desire made reality.

I wanted to be able to share some photos of binding works using my papers, and I asked for them privately to a pair of friends.

These are the first ones. Diana sent them to me, from Mexico. A beautiful conservation box thought by her and Tania who was who realized it.

Case, box and book...

... and later, six more images of the box.

Thank you very much, Diana and Tania, I really love your work.

And, if you allow me, I want use this entry to request to everyone who want it, to send to me photos of his work. I would like very much being able to publish them and share with everybody the enjoyment that bookbinding provides to me.

Paste papers and young people.

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Before August starts I want to remember a “little workshop” on paste papers that I did at the end of June in a bookstore specialized in infantile and juvenile topics “Kirikú and the witch”, in Madrid, on number 17, Rafael Salazar Alonso street.

Here Olga Espartero and Lourdes Sobrino teach every Saturday an introductory course on bookbinding, helping with this activity to develop the children’s imagination and its love and appreciation for the book. They invited me to do a workshop one of these Saturdays, and we think about the last one of the course to celebrate somehow his end with colors’ games. I chose the technique of paste papers, because it does not need so many means as marbling and because, as they say... it is a children's game.

I knew that it is not so since I learned to paint these papers with Susanne Krause, perhaps the best teacher of this technique that can be found today in the world; certainly, she teaches with so much professionalism and rigor that the less one can think is that it’s a technique as complicated and fantastic as any other one could be. But going to the matter: they say that it’s a children's game, and although I am sure it isn’t, I was thinking that perhaps it was the more indicated technique to spend a pair of hours "playing" at painting papers. Paste papers. I didn’t know where I was coming…

The arrangements are not great, but people always look with expectancy.

My first intention was, naturally, to teach how to make some models which my students could adapt to its binding projects.

One of the typical rhomboid designs of this technique.

They followed me a little bit… at first. They learned to dye the paste, to extend it on a dampened paper, to draw with combs of diverse materials...

The principal thing on paste papers is that designs are not obtained adding painting with brushes or paintbrushes, but"taken it away" of the paper. With anything, fortune instruments, a sponge, clothing tweezers, the handle of a brush, or the fingers of the artist…

...and here finished the “academic” education because...

...when I said this Gonzalo went red in his face...

... and rapidly he interpreted "fingers" as "hands"...

... to end it up by trying... with his nose.

They all followed Gonzalo’s lead, and I devoted myself to admire the wastefulness of creativity of the group.

The effect was contagious equally on parents...

We all learned and enjoyed. Young people remained well satisfied with its paste papers that they will use next year in one of its books...

...or: perhaps its satisfaction was because the course was finishing?...

...Yes, for sure it was because they were beginning its holidays.

For Gloria, 2. ¿Big... or small?

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Not long ago, according to an information provided by Oughzan, Oz, from Istanbul, the marbling master Ali Sentürk managed to raise the record of the biggest Ebru realized up to date in 4,6 square meters … more. That is to say that the previous record was established in 20 square meters, and now it has remained in 24,6. I do not even want to remember the mats suffering, but anyone can do the account and transform this measure to breadth by length, a bucketful atrocity is what it is necessary to marble this ebru, undoubtedly.


Another Turkish artist, Hikmet Barutcugil, realized a demonstration in the book’s fair at Frankfurt, although very deficient I have a photo of this event, and it is enough to look at it to see that things should have been very close, I don’t know if at the end he extended more the record.




There's a photo album of this event on Hikmet's web page, by the middle: http://www.ebristan.com/?d=album&aid=3


Hikmet, always following Oz, already marbled the curtains of a five stars hotel, by means of a special procedure opening the rolled cloth as it was introducing it in his bucketful. Probably these curtains are the longest fabric ever marbled.


But years ago another artist, this time from the USA, was going in another way. Christopher Weimann published in 1980 a book titled: marbling in miniature. His size is 7,5 centimeters high for 5,5 wide and the original samples "at full page" of 5,5 x 4 centimeters. He replicated in this size classic models that usually are made in sheets of 50 x 70 centimeters. In the sample of the "swirls" for example, it can be counted up to 15, so the visual effect is exactly the same one that if the model will be contemplated in "normal" size. For Oz, Weimann realized the smallest biggest marbling of the world. And, fortunately, others agree, as Weimann got the "Award of Merit the Western Book Exhibition" in 1981 for this little book.





Oz thinks, with good reason, that the size does not matter, not always a big work is synonymous of excellence, or the small work of unimportant. A big work can be a great work of art, or not; and a small work, as in this case, is a great work of art.


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