Art Show 3: Celtic Folio Cover
An artifact of days when I seemed to have infinite patience, a curiously expressed notion of ambition, and apparently little or no need of money.
From February through May in 1978, a major loan exhibition came to San Francisco’s deYoung Museum, Treasures of Early Irish Art, covering a 3000 year period from 1500 BC to 1500 AD. Kind of a big deal. There was an abundance of Irish oriented programming scheduled on KPFA leading up to the event, and the estimable Padreigin McGillicuddy, Editor, was looking for some sort of Celtic art for the cover of Folio. I was just standing around.
Being the cover of a magazine, there needed to be space where other text related to programming would go. I negotiated hard for the smallest text rectangle they would accept, and then feared for the worst in their choice of font. I had no intention of hand lettering anything, and anyway the choice of what else to put on the cover would be changing right up to the minute the Folio went to press.
A photostat copy of the working drawing was made for the next phase of the process. Two copies actually, so I could take one home and obsess about what I’d done so far, which was the equivalent of getting paid. Those were very pleasurable hours, to be deep into a project, and confident that it would get carried through. I was learning about graphic art processes that I had never studied, and had cohorts who were helping me in any way they could. And I was part of a genuine community of progressive artists and activists during the time when radio was still a vital format.
Below is the final, printed Folio cover. It required the laborious razor cutting of three layers of Rubylith masking to designate the various color areas. I was trying to achieve black and white plus light, medium and dark green gradations of ink. Budget considerations specified one color and black. “Grey” was hand-stippled with a Rapidograph.
There was one very troublesome sheet of Rubylith for the light green, precisely cut around every curve of the negative space of the Tree of Life knot work. The medium green layer — which was in the four corner squares and the pot of the Tree in the center — didn’t show well in the final printing. I’m totally over it now. Really. I only mention it as a point of historical interest.
Forty two years later, I don’t know what KPFA even means to me. I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore. There’s one in the car that I never turn on. It was all going to change anyhow, over time. I was part of it, however little of that change I could see. And in that world of listener-sponsored radio, I was contributing visual imagery to encourage people to tune in and listen.
