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THE SAD SEA

New Artist's Book by Marcus Rees Roberts
The title of this book comes from Federico Garcia Lorca’s collection of poems, Poet in New York, (‘Cry To Rome – from the tower of The Chrysler Building’).

Between 1929 and 1930 Lorca spent nine months in New York. It was his first trip outside Spain and one that had a deep and lasting effect on him. He was both exhilarated and appalled by the experience of living in a large city. “This is not hell,” he wrote in one poem, “but the street.” On one hand, he loved the energy and strangeness of New York, but he felt that by its very nature a great city is indifferent to the individual, and its architecture is indifferent to nature. “What we call civilization,” wrote V.S. Pritchett, “he called slime and wire.”

From this experience, Lorca wrote some of his most inventive but anguished poetry. Rees Roberts has tried to convey some of the chaos and fragmentation that Lorca put into these poems, excitement and disgust, fascination and revulsion, and also the overriding sense of the poet’s isolation.
'The Sad Sea' - Marcus Rees Roberts

Triple section artist’s book, 2009
presented in a drop-back box with inlaid etching.
Inkjet, acrylic, chalk and crayon on Bockingford’ 190gsm
and acid free tissue, laid on Khadi handmade cotton rag 480gsm.
Edition of 25.
Box: 51 x 36.5 x 5.5 cm
Published by Pratt Contemporary 2009.

It is the Day Returning

In this Artist’s Book, the artist has drawn upon
previous work - images from his etchings,
books and films.
Its title refers to the poem in his short film,
La Colonia.

Inkjet, drypoint, acrylic, chalk and crayon on
Hahnemühle ‘Bugra’ 140gsm and acid free tissue,
laid on Khadi handmade cotton rag 400gsm.
18 pages. Sewn with loose wrap-around cover.
42.5 x 30.5cm. Edition of 25 + 2 artist’s proofs,
2 printer’s proofs and 2 archive proofs.
Published 2007.

Page spred from 'It is the Day Returning'.
Marcus Rees Roberts 2007

Ash to Dark Water

Marcus Rees Roberts

Ash to Dark Water, 2005. Triple Section Digital Artist’s Book presented in a wooden box with engraved lid. Edition of 25 with etching, drypoint, acrylic, chalk and crayon on Hahnemühle ‘Bugra’ 140gsm and acid free tissue, laid on Khadi handmade cotton rag 480gsm.
Box: 49 x 35 x 6.2cm (191/4” x 133/4” x 23/8”).

This limited edition artists book has developed from ‘The White Wings of Time Passing’.  The starting point was Book X1 of The Odyssey which begins Pound’s Cantos, with its haunting imagery of the sea journey to The Underworld, and its question, “how art thou come to this dark coast?”
Section 1 from Ash to Dark Water presented in a wall mounted
perspex display case.		 Details from Ash to Dark Water by Marcus Rees Roberts.
Triple section Artist’s Book in a limited edition boxed set signed on each section by the artist.
Published May 2005
Ash to Dark Water (Boxed)

The complete Artist's Book is
presented in a wooden box with engraved lid.

Box size: 49 x 35 x 6.2cm

SEE MORE IMAGES OF ASH TO DARK WATER (BOXED)
The Fountain of Tears

The title of this book comes from the Arabic name for the spring in a village outside Granada where Lorca was shot in 1936. He was buried somewhere in the olive groves in the hills nearby.

Two predominant themes of love and death run through Lorca’s work, which often uses a form close to a song, with a haunting refrain; this apparent lightness of touch conceals a sense of barely constrained chaos. By layering the images, Rees Roberts has tried to convey the ambiguity and complexity of Lorca’s work, and his use of repeated images suggest Lorca’s subtly shifting refrains.

Digital Artist’s Book printed in an edition of 100 + 10 artist’s proofs, 2 printer’s proofs and 2 archive proofs.
Printed by Peter Notton on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255gsm with printed collage on hand-made paper. 20 pages including a 4-page pull-out. Page size: 29.7cm x 21.2cm (11 3/4” x 8 3/8”). Linen binding.

Published: Pratt Contemporary Art, 2003.
WHITE WINGS OF TIME PASSING
Songs for a man on whom the sun has gone down

The title and subtitle of this book come from Ezra Pound's Canto 74.

In May 1945 Ezra Pound was imprisoned in a cage at a US detention camp outside Pisa; it was whilst he was there that he began his Pisan Cantos.

Fragments of text from the Pisan Cantos and Homer's Odyssey hover over the images of imprisonment and the voyage, the dual themes of this book.

Digital Artist's Book printed in an edition of 100 + 10 artist's proofs, 2 printer's proofs and 2 archive proofs.
Printed by Peter Notton on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255gsm with printed collage on hand-made papers. 40 pages.
Page size: 20.7cm x 20cm (8 1/8" x 7 7/8"). Full linen cased binding.

Published: Pratt Contemporary Art, 2004.
A Room in Portbou

In September 1940 Walter Benjamin died in a hotel room in Portbou. In 1933 he had fled Berlin for Paris. When the Vichy Government signed an armistice with Germany he decided to leave Paris, hoping to escape to the U.S. In Marseille he had tried to board a ship bound for Ceylon, but failed. With increasing desperation he crossed the Pyrenees and reached Portbou, the Spanish border town on the Mediterranean. Here he was betrayed by the hotel owner and, fearing that he would be turned over to the French border police, who in turn would hand him over to the Gestapo, he committed suicide.

Marcus Rees Roberts has long been interested in the work of Walter Benjamin and wanted to make a book with references to his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. For a book made digitally he thought this would have made an interesting point but, unable to obtain permission, he has written a text himself in the form of a letter to Walter Benjamin, imagining his arrival and his last day in this dour and forbidding place. There are also two images in the book from Kosovo, and references to the camps from which Walter Benjamin was escaping. The artist wanted the adjacent pages to be seen through, and veiled by, these spectral images.

The themes of this book are exile, despair and betrayal, and the artist’s attitude towards events that take place beyond his window, but which do not immediately effect him. It is also overshadowed by genocide, whether it be called The Final Solution or ethnic cleansing.
Digital Artist’s Book
29.7cm x 21.2cm (11 3/4" x 8 3/8"); 24 pages.
Hand-sewn, softback. Printed in an edition of 130 on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255gsm and Hochtransparent 110gsm, with printed collage on hand-made paper.

Special Edition: 30 from the edition of 130 are presented boxed with an original one-plate etching.

Published: Pratt Contemporary Art, 2002.
A Book of the Lost

This book is a direct development from A Room in Portbou. One image was the starting point, that of a Balkan railway station as refugees board and relatives say goodbye. This image appears in both books but in A Book of the Lost individual heads are isolated and the work develops from there.

It is about departure and loss. Fragments of text, from an imaginary letter written to someone who has gone, adds an alternative to this: here the theme is not loss but the sense of being lost,

Digital Artist's Book.
29.7cm x 21.2cm (11 3/4" x 8 3/8"); 16 pages.
Hand-sewn, softback.
Printed in an edition of 100.

Inkjet on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255gsm with printed collage on hand-made paper.

Published: Pratt Contemporary Art, 2003.
The Artist's Studio in Times of Unease

Digital Artist's Book.
29.7cm x 21.2cm (11 3/4" x 8 3/8"); 16 pages.
Hand-sewn, softback.
Printed in an edition of 100.

Inkjet on Somerset Velvet Enhanced 255gsm with printed collage on hand-made paper.

Published: Pratt Contemporary Art, 2003.