A  journal chapbook, notes from below, rests in a niche at the bottom of a wooden box. Graphite sketches of vessels accompany journal entries, and are printed on Khadi cotton rag paper handmade in Tamil Nadu. Ink washes individually added to each book. The chapbook’s cover is terra cotta Cave paper, printed with a line drawing of a fingerprint.

All in a box of straight-grain pine accented with paduak or wenge wood, and covered with a lid of tumbled Siena travertine marble. Each book cover is individually painted and signed. New. Both books signed and numbered by Mary Heeber. Fine.

Heebner writes in the chapbook: ‘notes’ about this edition:
“The origin of this project began with two consecutive trips to Chilean Patagonia. Riding horses through the rugged terrain of the Patagonian Sierra, we came upon middens and petrified remnants of ancient forests. In Last Hope Sound, Puerto Natales, I sketched a collection of messen, the indigenous Mapuche amphoras and ceremonial vessels. Later in my Santa Barbara studio I made two series of paintings: Below and Beneath and Unearthed. This book draws upon all of that work.”

Related posts:

1. Mary Heebner — Seeking the Open Heart — Poems by Michael Hannon.
2. John Gerard — An die Musik — Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
3. John Gerard & Berthold Brecht — Lied der belebenden Wirkung des Geldes [Song of the Enlivening Effect of Money]

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1. simplemente maria press — Mary Heebner — Unearthed
2. John Gerard & Mary Beth Schmidt Fogarty — The Stream of Life
3. Red Angel Press — The Bridge — Three poems by Hart Crane from his collection

(Heebner, Mary) Western Trilogy I: The Prairie, The Desert, the Ocean. Artist’s book by Mary Heebner. simplemente maria press. [Santa Barbara. CA] 2000. Original watercolor paintings and text by Mary Heebner on Sekishu Natural paper. 3 vol. Accordion fold. 5.75″ x 5.25″. Typeset digitally in Bembo & Trajan and printed letterpress from polymer plates by John Balkwill of Lumino Press. Paloma Cain assisted in layout and production. Paintings and text are tipped on accordion-folded white Tiepolo paper. USGS topographical maps of Nebraska, the Mojave Desert and bathymetric maps of the Pacific Ocean are used as endpapers in The Prairie, The Desert and The Ocean, respectively. Each book has a different color cloth spine and back board, with front board in toning paper. Titles and press logo in gilt on spines. Separate colophon folder with original watercolor; signed and numbered by Heebner in pencil. Textured blue/tan cloth slipcase. One in an edition of 20 sets, with only 15 for sale. Fine.

The text is excerpted from The Western Horizon, Abrams, New York, 2000.

No related posts.

(simplemente maria press) On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea by Pablo Neruda. A la Orilla Azul del Silencio: Poemas del Mar por Pablo Neruda. Designed and illustrated by Mary Heebner. English translations by Alastair Reid. simplemente maria press. [Santa Barbara. 2001.] Portfolio – 14″ x 11″. The original watercolor paintings in the Isla Negra series were made for the specific purpose of creating the editioned book, On the Blue Shore of Silence, using the Giclée printing process at Duganne Atelier, Santa Monica, under the direction of the artist. They were produced on Somerset Velvet 300. The portfolio consists of 12 hand-folded folios, each containing an image presented with a poem in Spanish by Pablo Neruda and Alastair Reid’s translation into English. The text was printed letterpress from polymer plates at The Lumino Press, Santa Barbara, California, on handmade linen paper produced by the artist with the assistance of Pat Almonrode at the Dieu Donné Mill, New York City. The poems are digitally typeset using Adobe Jenson for the English text and Arrighi for the Spanish; Trajan titles. The cockling on the edge of the linen sheets was purposefully intended to allude to waves approaching a shore. The handmade linen wrappers were individually painted with indigo pigmented pulp by the artist at Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. Images and poems were tipped onto larger sheets of Fabriano Tiepolo. Also included is a hand-sewn signature consisting of title page, introduction, table of contents, colophon and acknowledgments. In a handmade case constructed with imported Japanese blue flecked silk book cloth over boards with Birch wood sides. Title on spine; fasteners are silverplate. Cases were produced at The Lumino Press. An edition of 50 copies; the first 22 are Special copies, each copy containing one of the signed, original watercolor paintings from the Isla Negra series mounted in a self-standing mat. 10 hors commerce copies were also produced. Fine.

One of the special edition copies, with the original watercolor painting laid in. (Regular edition also available)

On the Blue Shore of Silence is Heebner’s fifth editioned artist’s book. Heebner states: “It was Alastair Reid who … enabled this project to come alive by agreeing to work with me and let me use his translations. The unexpected joy of producing this book was the time spent listening to Alastair spin stories about his friendship with Pablo [Neruda] as we selected poems, read them aloud, digressed about the sea and Chile, about language, color, and light. … Carmen Balcells, agent for Neruda’s estate, kindly granted permission to use his poems in their original Spanish.”

Alastair Reid, (b.1926) has lived in his native Scotland, in Spain, Greece, the UK, the USA, France, Central and South America. He is a distinguished poet, author of more than twenty books, and was a contributor to the New Yorker magazine from 1951 until the 1990s. He is an internationally acclaimed translator of Latin American poetry, notably the writings of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Reid said about this book: “I am certain that Pablo Neruda, who was an impassioned book collector, would have crowed with delight at seeing and handling Mary Heebner’s On the Blue Shore of Silence (which has been brought out as a trade book by HarperCollins).

Related posts:

1. Circle Press – Late August on the Coast
2. Eighteen lithographs by Henry Moore
3. High Tide Press — An Architectural Bestiary Black & White Version

Regular edition without the signed original watercolor laid in. (Special copy also available)

On the Blue Shore of Silence is Heebner’s fifth editioned artist’s book. Heebner states: “It was Alastair Reid who … enabled this project to come alive by agreeing to work with me and let me use his translations. The unexpected joy of producing this book was the time spent listening to Alastair spin stories about his friendship with Pablo [Neruda] as we selected poems, read them aloud, digressed about the sea and Chile, about language, color, and light. … Carmen Balcells, agent for Neruda’s estate, kindly granted permission to use his poems in their original Spanish.”

Alastair Reid, (b.1926) has lived in his native Scotland, in Spain, Greece, the UK, the USA, France, Central and South America. He is a distinguished poet, author of more than twenty books, and was a contributor to the New Yorker magazine from 1951 until the 1990s. He is an internationally acclaimed translator of Latin American poetry, notably the writings of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Reid said about this book: “I am certain that Pablo Neruda, who was an impassioned book collector, would have crowed with delight at seeing and handling Mary Heebner’s On the Blue Shore of Silence (which has been brought out as a trade book by HarperCollins).

Related posts:

1. Circle Press – Late August on the Coast
2. Eighteen lithographs by Henry Moore
3. High Tide Press — An Architectural Bestiary Black & White Version

(simplemente maria press) The Tragic History of Hamlet: An Artist’s Interpretation of the Classic Text by William Shakespeare. [By] Mary Heebner. Santa Barbara. 2008. 16” x 12” x 2”. 20 prints from original collage paintings, letterpress text. Watermarked paper with stencil and pulp-painting. John Balkwill of The Lumino Press, Santa Barbara, printed the text letterpress on the individual mingei paper folio sleeves, and on the handmade paper sheets, editioned by hand on a Vandercook UNI cylinder press, using Centaur typeface. He also laid out and printed the complete play in booklet form. Artist and bookmaker designed the clamshell box, which Balkwill built with black mohair over boards with a red leather spine. The cover paper of the clamshell box is from Cave Paper in Minneapolis, onto which the skull motif is debossed. Prints in brown handmade paper wrappers with a red trim in the box. Hand-stitched booklet with entire play Hamlet included in the box. It is hand-stitched with a cover of handmade amate paper, debossed with a hand-drawn ‘HAMLET’. One in an edition of 20 copies, signed by the artist, three of which are hors commerce. New.

Heebner writes: “In 2003 Josine Ianco-Starrels invited me to participate in an exhibit, “Shakespeare as Muse”, at Southern Oregon University Museum of Art. I had been working on a series of small figurative paintings that I sensed could become a part of a series with works by William Shakespeare as inspiration. These painting became the left panels of the original triptych collages of the Hamlet series from which twenty direct archival pigment prints were made on Somerset Velvet paper for this artist’s book.

“I made the pigmented flax and abaca two-sided chemises, the watermarked ‘Ophelia’ and HAMLET over beaten abaca sheets, and the individually pulp painted, and stenciled cotton and abaca sheets used for the title page, with papermakers Paul Wong, Steve Orlando and Moirin Reynolds at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York City in September, 2007.

I drew a version of the honeysuckle image from the Second Quarto title page, printed in 1604, and added to this a sketch of a skull that I used for the cover image and as the header on each of the folio text blocks. I drew an eye for the title page, beneath the stormy, moody pulp painting, denoting that this was my visual interpretation of Shakespeare’s classic text.

“… Source for the text is ‘The Globe Edition’ of the works of William Shakespeare, edited by William George Clark and William Aldis Wright, electronically available through the University of Virginia Library.”

A powerful new interpretation of a great classic.

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