Way back in 2004—the dark ages in Internet time—I wrote the first English language article about gluebooks. I started the Yahoo gluebooks group the same week. I love gluebooks, simply because they’re the anti-product, anti-technique art form. Just grab some glue, and some stuff, and have at it. They’re a sigh of relief in the relentless parade of arty pursuits that require patience, practice, and financial investment.
I have quite a few gluebooks in various stages of completion. Some have just a few pages worked, while others were for daily challenges, and are finished. I have them tucked in cabinets in my living room, and in the drawers of my coffee table, which is artfully arranged so you can’t see the baskets of art supplies tucked into it.
Strangely, I haven’t done much gluebooking lately, but recently, I felt the need to start up again. Rather than start a new one, I decided to add on to the books I already have going—so that maybe, some day, I might complete one. I’ve been doing a sort of alphabetical thing in an old thesaurus off and on since 2005, and this week, I added a few more. This is harder than you might think. Coming up with images, words and interesting letters for the entire alphabet is more of a challenge than I expected.
There’s just one more weekend left in 2010, so I’m starting to look back, and see how I did with my weekly thing, and whether I want to continue it in 2011, or start some other sort of incentive project to encourage me to make more art for fun rather than business. More on that next weekend…