A Carpet Pages Little Black Book
A Carpet Pages Little Black Book (in frame)
The Carpet Pages Little Books all have their own integral frame for housing the book and mounting on a wall (please refer to photos).
They come in 4 colours Blue, Red, Yellow and Black. These colours relate directly to the CMYK Four-Colour Process printing colours, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black/Key. CMYK is used in the imagery collaged onto the original Carpet Pages Book, on the Little Carpet Pages Books (LCPBs) actual pages and the reproductions of the Carpet Pages as prints.
To make the LCPBs pages I cut long strips from four of the Carpet Page prints which had been enlarged for this purpose. Each print gave four strips. Taking one strip from each print varied the visual content of each book. These long strips were then folded concertina style and glued at the back edge making a book block of turn-able pages.
The cover hinging mechanism was achieved using adhesive book tape. The tape is in the four colours Blue, Red, Yellow and Black thus identifying from which edition the Little Carpet Pages book is from.
The edition is in series as each book has a unique cover and pages with different sequencing making for a rarefied, individual book in an edition (1/10). Ten books per colour (Blue, Red, Yellow and Black), making 40 LCPBs in total.
Throughout the Carpet Pages development as an artist book and the LCPBs, Shinro Ohtake’s work has been a valuable reference. He makes his most direct statement to the Four-Colour Process in his Centre for Contemporary Graphic Art (CCGA) Artist Book YMCB (Yellow, Magenta, Cyanogen & Black).
Shinro Ohtake’s occasional artistic collaborator Vaughn Oliver has also made an overt CMYK reference in his ‘This Rimy River-Vaughn Oliver and v23 Graphic works 1988-1994.’ He leaves the colour test strip on the edges of this exhibition catalogue; usually these colour test strip guides are cut away as waste when the book blocks are trimmed to size.
In an indirect, tenuous way the Little Carpet Pages Books have a connection to Andrew Lang’s “Coloured” Fairy Books having fairy tale/folklore imagery and colour related covers and titles.
Carpet Pages Little Yellow Book (in frame on wall)
Carpet Pages Little Yellow Book (open)
