I love books, and after seeing a zine show put together in part by Laura Calle, the Director of Programming for Living Walls, I started looking for ways to make one of my own. It began as just a hand-made book of my small drawings (I have a lot of these since I don't sketch--they're basically studies, experiments on fitting pieces together in different ways.) But then I remembered what I used to do in St. Louis at the middle school where I worked as an after school assistant. The program I was working for had very little money for supplies but they asked me to run an art class three times a week, so I started making drawings that I could photocopy in the office for my kids to color. I won't say I won over everyone with these, but there was a little group that would sit at a round table in the cafeteria, surrounded by tons of noise and action, and they would color page after page and tune out everything else. I realized how important that had been for me when I was in school, and how I have built my work around it--the desire to focus intensely on something without self-consciousness. So I'm offering up this book for whoever wants to color and lose themselves in the repetition of something. It's a good way to ground yourself, even in the midst of total chaos.
Every copy of TRI-COLOR features 16 pages of drawings and is independently printed and bound by hand with thread. You can buy them here for $10.
Sample pages:
