Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

the assembly of poetic reflection achieves
much. Several pages convey a sense of space
with little more than a horizontal black line
three-quarters of the way up the page. The
background is on roughly marbled paper, with
little broken-up mottlings of bright colour
tapping in simple cues for space and
atmosphere. McGarry works this (pretty good)
trick in many of the pictures making up this
book. The other one is to have swirly bits of
marbling filling up the whole picture plane
(no horizon)- this becomes a subsurface space
where the diving and bubbling goes on. My
favourite page has the line “clouds in double
surface” and separates two groups of puffy
shapes with a horizontal line across the page.
The basic background is (as throughout) on
marbled paper, this time quite open with
hundreds of small sky-blue marks. It achieves as
good a feeling of a calm, open sea as I’ve seen
anywhere.
Investigating this paper again just now I got a
bit of a shock: I had assumed that the various
spreads in this concertina-format book were on
seperate bits of marbled paper, selected for
their appropriateness to individual pages.
It’s actually on one continuous sheet: so the
artist has deliberately dipped the precise areas
on the sheet into the differently-prepared
marbling trays. I’d not suspected such a level of
organisation: the playful line and unique
character of the books prepares one for
something of a dashed-off miracle. There’s still
a lot of that to it: it takes tremendous poise, a
clear vision and a good heart to plunge right in
like this. It’s got that in common with Chinese
brush painting. Every mark tells: no
pentimenta. (In fact, regrets of any kind have
no place in this book.) Preparing the paper like
this ups the ante a little bit. To fail on this
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surface would spoil the material and the effort
would go in the bin. It also reveals more
calculation in the effects achieved. Although
the one-word review remains “charming”,
I’ve got to look at the fact that the charm is
intended. That the artist has been artful, rather
than naive.
These artful effects hold their own. The glow
of the marbling and the swirling colours
combined with the pouncing expressive line
make several pages quite dramatic. I can’t
get over the space that combining the two
elements of the marbling and the inky line has
produced. Either one of these elements on
their own would tend towards a flattening
effect. But in these hands they’ve been
transformed.
There’s an element of transformation in the
narrative as well. The rowing, diving (and, one
feels, probably pic-a-nicking) figures aren’t
clothed: if this is happening off the Irish coast
there’s gonna be shiverin’. Of course, it’d be
daft to expect wetsuits. This is happening in a
luminous world where the landmarks turn into
chapters, the noticing of fish into events that
penetrate with wonder. It’s a childlike view of
the world in some senses: although there’s
clearly adult wonder going on here too. In this
way it’s a somewhat cinematic book. Shafts of
illumination peep through as we open up
concurrent pages, and build up into a narrative
space that we travel through (“row through”
seems appropriate). And we get a nicely
cinematic ending too. The inky camera pulls
back and isolates the tiny boat on a vast surface,
“huge swathes of silver shadow”, then pulls back
further, until our only connection is the sound
we can still hear of the oars: “dip creak, dip
creak” And fade out...
I love this book even more for discovering that
he meant it. What I mean is that I’d previously
seen the effects and thought them happy
coincidences, or as wise choices of material at
the most complex. But in reality this is a
carefully-planned work that artfully arranges
itself to produce the effects that we experience.
It tells us that we can be aware of the world
around us, and experience it in all it’s
sensational vibrancy, and still use our awareness
to make and think in articulate ways.