Papermaking Open Studio

 

 

The Paper Plant presents an Open Studio Thursday and Friday, August 14 and 15 from 10 AM to 6 PM.  John Dancy-Jones will be working and demonstrating.  Papermaking, marbling, printmaking and letterpress printing will all be showcased with opportunities for hands-on interactions.

Location: 528 N. Person Street, Raleigh, NC

For information call 839-8277

***************

     I am wrapping my summer up with a bang!  Two big days of open studio with all the pistons pumping.  I will be making hand-laid paper, pulling Snapper prints with the flatbed press, printing a bookmark with the Kelsey 3×5, combining a block image with text on the Excelsior 9×13, and marbling laid sheets!  We will have our usual studio display of notecards, blank books, and stock rag papers.  Anyone who comes by can probably pick up a couple of tomatoes – our plants have gone crazy.

     Hope to see some of you.  This was a chance to respond to some of the many requests and inquiries since the N&O article last winter.  Also, I have a couple of friends who have been wanting to play in the book arts a bit, and I hope to see them for some hours of sharing and learning.

The Paper Plant was Raleigh’s home for alternative arts in the 1980’s.  Hand-laid paper and a letterpress shop was nestled in a used bookstore which also had monthly art openings and the Thursday Night Open Readings, which I, John Dancy-Jones, emceed for over seven years.  I also acted as papermaker, printer and publisher.  The bookstore closed in December of 1990 but I continue to make hand-laid paper, print, and publish.

****************

Studio Photo Tour

Studio Visit with “Historical Narrative”

Jeffery Beam helps us mourn Jonathan Williams

  he done

what he could

when he got round

to it

Jeffery Beam is a wonderful literary character who works at UNC-CH and lives in Hillsborough.  He has a book out of collected poems and has many interesting publications to his credit.

He is always alerting me to wonderful things, such as his readings for Groundhog Day, or a friend’s musical setting for a soldier’s last letter home, or the blooming of the Dove tree in the UNC Arboretum.  Recently he gave me the news that Jonathan Williams had died.  He knew the man and understood his importance as few do.

Here is the beginning of Jeffery’s obituary:

                      Poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, founder of The Jargon Society press, one of the most renowned small presses of the last half of the twentieth century, and champion and publisher of some of the most important mid and late century poets in the United States and England, died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. Williams, 79, began his avant-garde press while a student at the Chicago Institute of Design, naming it “Jargon” not only for its meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear, “jargonelle” and the French “jargon,” meaning the twittering of birds.

Jeffery writes of his personal work, the incredibly important work of The Jargon Society press, but mostly he evokes for us the amazingly unique style and oulook of this man.

                       Williams’ interests and talents, revealed him as a Renaissance man – publisher; poet and satirist; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand.  Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, his incisive humor, and his confidently experimental and inventive poems and prose.  His interests, in his own words, raised, “the common to grace,” while paying “close attention to the earthy.” At the forefront of the avant-garde, and yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional, Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved, as he described it, “more and more away from the High Art of the city” settling “for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.”

***********

Just closed is a show whose prospectus gives some idea of the many dimensions of this man.  Thank you, Jeffery, as we try to find the proper way to remember and honor this unique individual.

Condolences may be sent to poet Thomas Meyer, Jonathan’s partner and
collaborator for forty years:

Thomas Meyer
The Jargon Society
P O Drawer 10
Highlands, NC 28741