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BRIGHTON PRESS Fine Press | Limited Edition | Artists' Books |
| Overview |
| Co-directors: On Craft Essay by Leah Ollman Collaborator's comments List of collections Exhibitions |
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Co-directors: On Craft |
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At Brighton Press, our aim is to use and enrich the elements and forms that a book possesses to translate thoughts, feelings, images, and information to the viewer in the form of a journey. The idea behind the book is central to all aesthetic and practical decisions made during its creation. The craft should push the idea forward rather than be used to call attention to itself. When readers enter our books, we want them to experience the physical reality of the book as part of the concept behind it—something to encourage involvement and dreaming. This participation helps readers forget about us as makers while they are inside the book. After that, the artisanship provides evidence of our commitment to the work and its concept. The craft behind the book involves complex and time-consuming processes, giving us the opportunity to reflect on all of the ways we can imbue the structure (one that is taken for granted and trusted by most people) with layers of underlying, related, sensual experience. It also gives the book lasting power. —Michele Burgess, Co-director One move allows another and so goes the process. A mistake may be forgotten, or may hold a place of special significance, however, it is inevitable and only adds to the memory or muscle reflex of how ideas come into being. Mistakes and steps and time, conversations, corrections of course, new direction and analysis, all in the name of craft. A sense of well-being or uncertainty is felt as others before us laid claim to the same territory. The discipline is unimportant, it cannot make a thing art or artistry, but, the sense of building and accomplishment is the stuff of exploration and in the arts it is the one thing that anyone who practices a method, whatever it might be, knows that to fail at the craft is to not fully realize a form. Success, on the other hand, is the lightness of realization and the ease of accepting one's work. I feel grateful that the work becomes an idea, seen, sensed, and felt by others. I am not certain I can explain this struggle of craft but I know it is part of the process. —Bill Kelly, Co-director |
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Essay by Leah Ollman |
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Mesopotamian scribes, some 4,000 years ago, used reeds to write on clay tablets shaped like eggs, prisms, and animal paws. Ancient Egyptians wrote and illustrated papyrus scrolls, rolled them in linen, and sealed them in earthenware jars. It was common for Chinese scrolls to be folded into fan or accordian-style books. Medieval manuscripts were written with organic inks and illuminated with gold hammered as thin as a butterfly wing. Books today are gray, lifeless things in comparison. Uniform, rectangular stacks of generic paper, mechanically printed and bound in cheap, cardboard covers, they are designed to accommodate the bookstore’s shelf more than the author’s intention. The book’s legacy of sculptural richness and textural complexity has been betrayed.
The books may be linked to tradition but never are they bound by convention. Bill Kelly, founder and co-director of the Press, speaks of a desire to “break the square.” The results are intensely tactile: small aqua folios that evoke the fluid undulations of water (“Poem Made of Water ”), or torn edges of a print that, like tense caresses, define the contours of the model’s neck (“She Said: I Tell You It Doesn’t Hurt Me”). If the books begin with the human touch in mind, so do they become fully realized only in the hands of the reader. The reader—viewer, user, or more accurately, reveling collaborator—completes each work through a rhythmic ritual of opening, uncovering, turning, and unfolding. It is a dance of sorts, a performance that cannot be passive, for in touching these pages, the reader confronts the passion of their makers. Mallarmé once compared the typographical arrangement of a poem to a musical score, for we hear it as we read. Just as words become sounds, so too do they become images, and the images, sensations. Aspiring toward an art that engages hand, eye, and mind with equal fervor, Brighton Press encourages the components of a book to shift and share roles freely. Words and images transcend their presumed boundaries to spawn verbal sculpture, visual poetry, “syllables that are rattles that are seeds” (Octavio Paz, Convergences [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987], p. 8), images that echo sounds, pages that embrace as they are embraced. Brighton Press books are difficult to categorize. They belong, albeit as rebellious offshoots, to the family tree that William Morris planted in England in 1890, when he started the Kelmscott Press. Aiming to reprise the dignity of craft in an era overtaken by vulgar, anonymous industrial production, Morris wrote, “I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty.” Kelly and the Press’s co-director Michele Burgess certainly value a fine product as well, but they also have a profound commitment to the exploratory process itself, the intuitive tumble into unfamiliar terrain. Questions and tangents guide them more than formulas, assumptions, and patterns as they continually push to reinvent and redefine the book. They choose artists [and writers] to work with, according to Burgess, “based on their ability to help us expand how we see.” The Press’s products could just as easily be labeled “artist’s books,” for the privileged access they grant the reader to the maker’s unmediated expression. They are intimate and immediate. They nurture a new kind of literacy, a sensual literacy beyond the direct reading of words and images. In the variety of their materials and approaches, Brighton Press books undermine assumptions about what a book is supposed to be, even as they celebrate the bookmaking tradition. Broadly defined, books are “a collection of surfaces to receive writing for the purpose of communicating ideas” (Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books [Chicago: American Library Association and London: The British Library, 1991], p. 1). But it takes two to communicate, and the creations of Brighton Press propose that a book is, fundamentally, a confluence of relationships—between text and image, type and the page, form and function, writer/artist and reader, space and time, poetry and music, prints and passion, potential and actuality. —Leah Ollman, January 16, 1993, Brighton Press Catalog for Palomar College Retrospective Exhibition |
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Collaborator's comments |
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The purpose of Brighton Press seems, quite literally, to keep every facet of the creative process continually “at hand.” What was once solitary becomes rich with the continual give and take of shared work; what was intimate grows deeper in the mutual desire to envision the whole. The book we produced together belongs equally to both of us. It is, as one might expect, a beautiful book. In all truth, however, I must say that I felt some sadness when the book was finally in my hands. The work was at an end, although in some essential way it remains with me. I hope that this conveys some small sense of how privileged I felt in working with Brighton Press. —Peter Everwine —Ian Tyson —C. G. Hanzlicek As an artist who has collaborated with the Press, I know something about how they do things—persuade, cajole, or trick artists into surpassing themselves in their contributions. They helped me (I’m putting this rather kindly) make decisions about my work I could not have made myself. Their books frequently represent the finest examples of work by the artists with whom they collaborate—has Manuel Neri, Faith Ringgold, or Harry Sternberg ever been so revealing, so direct, so unassuming, and so much themselves? —Brian D. Cohen, Bridge Press —Robert Cremean |
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List of collections |
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| Brighton Press’s archives from 1985 - 1999 are held in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, San Francisco, CA Amherst College Library, Special Collections, Amherst, MA Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Art Students League, New York, NY Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, La Jolla, CA Boston Public Library, Boston, MA Boston University, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston, MA Brigham Young University, Harold B. Lee Library, Provo, UT British Library, London, Great Britain Brooklyn Museum of Art, Prints and Drawings Division, Brooklyn, NY Brown University, The John Hay Library, Providence, RI California State University, Fresno, CA California State University, Long Beach, University Art Museum, Long Beach, CA California State University, Northridge, University Library, Northridge, CA California State University, Sacramento, Library, Sacramento, CA Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH Claremont College, Denison Library, Special Collections, Claremont, CA Columbia University, Butler Library, New York, NY Cornell University, Olin Library, Ithaca, NY Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI Dartmouth College, Baker Library, Rare Book Collection, Hanover, NH Escondido Public Library, Escondido, CA Florida Atlantic University, The Jaffe Book Arts Collection, Wimberly Library, Boca Raton, FL Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles, CA The Grolier Club, New York, NY Harvard University, The Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, CA Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA Mahler Museum, Prague, The Czech Republic Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Middlebury College, Special Collections Library, Middlebury, VT Mills College, Special Collections Library and Center for the Book, Oakland, CA Musée d’Art Américain, Giverny, France Museum Meermanno, The Hague, Netherlands Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Gallery of Art, Library, Washington, DC National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC Newberry Library, Chicago, IL New York Public Library, Print Collection and Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, New York, NY Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA Okemah Public Library, Okemah, OK Princeton University, Firestone Library, Princeton, NJ Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, Miami, FL San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA San Diego Public Library, Central Library, Wangenheim Room, San Diego, CA San Diego State University, Malcolm Love Library, San Diego, CA San Francisco Public Library, Special Collections, San Francisco, CA Smith College, Neilson Library, Rare Book Collection, Northampton, MA Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC Stanford University, Library, Special Collections, Stanford, CA State University of New York, Poetry and Rare Book Collection, Buffalo, NY Swarthmore College, McCabe Library, Special Collections, Swarthmore, PA Syracuse University, George Arents Library, Syracuse, NY Temple University, Samuel Paley Library, Special Collections, Philadelphia, PA Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH Trinity College, Watkinson Library, Hartford, CT University of Alabama, Friends of the Book Arts, Tuscaloosa, AL University of Arizona, Library, Tucson, AZ University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Special Collections, Berkeley, CA University of California, Irvine, University Library, Irvine, CA University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Special Collections Library, San Diego, CA University of California, Santa Barbara, University Library, Santa Barbara, CA University of Central Florida, Library, Orlando, FL University of Delaware, Library, Special Collections, Newark, DE University of Georgia, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Athens, GA University of Idaho, Eli Oboler Library, Pocatello, ID University of Illinois, Rare Books, University Library, Urbana, IL University of Indiana, Lilly Library, Bloomington, IN University of Iowa, Library, Iowa City, IA University of Kansas, Spencer Research Library, Lawrence, KS University of Michigan, Hatcher Graduate Library, Ann Arbor, MI University of Missouri, Columbia, MO University of Nebraska, Special Collections, Love Library, Lincoln, NE University of Nevada, University Library, Reno, NV University of North Carolina, Special Collections, Jackson Library, Greensboro, NC University of Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY University of San Diego, Copley Library, San Diego, CA University of San Franciso, Gleeson Library, San Franciso, CA University of Southern California, Doheny Library, Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA University of Texas at El Paso, Library, Special Collections, El Paso, TX University of Utah, Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, UT University of Vermont, Bailey-Howe Library, Burlington, VT University of Virginia, Special Collections Library, Charlottesville, VA University of Wisconsin, Kohler Library, Madison, WI Vassar College, Library, Poughkeepsie, NY Wake Forest University, Smith Reynolds Library, Winston-Salem, NC Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Washington University, Library, Special Collections, St. Louis, MO Wells College, Book Arts Center, Aurora, NY West Glamorgan County Library, Wales Western Michigan University, Library, Kalamazoo, MI Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Williams College, Chapin Library of Rare Books, Williamstown, MA Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Haven, CT Yale University, Sterling Library, New Haven, CT |
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Exhibitions |
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VIEWS FROM SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
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While the books of Brighton Press seem radically sensual next to the mass-produced volumes churned out by big publishing houses each year, they are actually extensions of some of the oldest and most fundamental traditions in bookmaking. Whether one-of-a-kind or printed in small editions, they are crafted individually, their materials purposefully resonant with the images and ideas within. Brighton Press books embody a peculiarly tight fusion of intentions, content, form, and design, a democratic union of words, images, and structure, sculpture and literature.
