A Painter's Day Book "Festival Prayers," 1999
| Date: | 1999
|
| Medium: | Altered book with oil paint |
| Size inches: | 5 3/4 x 3 1/4 x 2 1/4 |
| Size cm: | 14.5 x 8.5 x 5.6
|
| Signature: | Signed, titled, and dated on the cover |
| |
| Location: | New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut |
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut. Accession Number 2013.54.5
Signed, titled, and dated on the cover.
Dear Larry: if you ever scout books again, George Deem...keeps a lovely ongoing book in which he wipes the paint from his brushes. His book is as Jean Cocteau thought the choreography of Parade should be: "Leur demarche doit etre comme un accident organise qui dure." (William S. Wilson, letter to Larry Shopmaker, re. exhibition A Private Reading: The Book as Image and Object, Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, New York, September 13 - November 10, 2001.)
In my library I have books printed in languages that I cannot read: Japanese, Hebrew, Polish. These books are for looking at, but not with the focus of reading.... One of my books in Hebrew has facing pages in English, a small thick prayer book with the English title The
Festival Prayers. At the end of the day I clean my palette with a palette knife, wiping the leftover oil paint across an open page of this book. I have done this with many books: Scott's Ivanhoe, Greek Drama, Immensee. I turn a new page each day; the paint oozes out from the pressed pages; when it dries it creates a striated record of the colors I am using in my paintings at the time. Within about a year the book is thick with paint, and weighs more than one would expect. I date these books and give each one the title A Painter's Daybook. (George Deem, "Self Covered Buttons," Let George Do It, The Post-Apollo Press, 2009, 15).
