It’s been far too long! Like a month, ya? Almost. My God! What have you been doing while I was away? Whose blog have you been reading? I am so jealous. I sure hope it was worth it.

Well, I have been busy. Aren’t I always? But this time, extra, extra busy. I pretty much finished Houses. Just putting on the last touches, like the last bits of embroidery, making the slipcases (YES, slipcases I said), and I built this page so you can start ordering them if you feel so inclined, or, can afford the price of these babies.

And did I mention that the Neil Farber | Carol Es book is now officially on sale!? Talk about price – these astonishingly rare book-works of art are at a hair-raising steal of just $125 a book! Yup. Not a joke in any way, shape or form. Chance Press is just cool like that. Oh, but you better get a move on because I hear that there are only like nine books left! And that was about three days ago – so GET ON IT!

This is the collaborative piece I created with Neil. It’s crazy cool!

Speaking of books, and confessions. What? Okay, maybe I haven’t been moving on binding up the Houses books as quickly as I should have been because I have been preoccupied with other things – and maybe just one of those things is the preparation of my next Artist’s book. I know, I know: I shouldn’t start a new project before I’ve completed the last, but I am just so fucking excited! I feel like if I don’t work on it just a little bit, I will pee all over the floor!

It’s pretty ironic though, don’t you think? I haven’t made a book out of Careless Press in over five years, and then suddenly, here comes two. Well, I’m telling you now that this next one will not get released until the beginning of 2014, and it is going to retail for way under $100. Not only that, it’s going to have more pages than any other book I have made so far! That’s mostly because it’s going to be offset printed. I would never be able to make a 120 original page book – at least not in five months. Ha!

So as you can tell, I already know a lot about this book. Do you want to know more? As much as I know?

Nah… Why would you want to know such silly things?

Well, I think I’m going to tell you anyway, whether you are here reading this or not. It’s my diary. Not yours.

I titled this book in French because it sounded way more fancy. It’s titled, Carol Es une Monographie de Lignes (a Monograph in Lines). What that is, is like a mini autobiography done only in black pen sketches. Only one page will have an original, colored page in colored pencil and ink. It will have somewhere between 45 and 75 drawings in it, eight chapters, and a letterpressed, hardbound cover.

And that’s a lot of information. The only thing I’m not giving you are the names of the chapters and the visuals. Hmmm wait. I know. There is a chapter called, Preliminaries. Here is the preliminary for Wrong Mom, 2001.

Okay, enough of that. I told you I was busy this last month, right? Well I had meetings. Meetings all over the place. Some were at my synagogue where I finally learned to read Hebrew! I bet you thought I already knew how, didn’t you? Well NO, I didn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t of had to pull Arctic Memory apart and repaint it, now would I? I was busy doing that too. I finished it. See?

That’s what it looks like now. Now the Hebrew is correct. Now I KNOW the Hebrew is correct. 😉

The Hebrew classes were not only informative, but fun. I thought it was going to be so incredibly hard to read a new language that had a completely different alphabet in different looking characters, and I mean, it’s not like it was a breeze, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was going to be. It is a fairly simple language, much simpler than English, as far as the sounds of the consonants and vowels and those rules go. It was a short class so I didn’t get deep into grammar yet, but I loved the whole experience enough to want to continue and even become an official member of the temple.

Sales have been up, so I just had to purchase this nifty case for my studio to hold all my very important brushes and other tools of the trade. My studio, Rubber Soul, as I have called it, gets dusty easily since it is just a converted garage, and I H-A-T-E that my beautiful brushes get dirty before I use them! There isn’t a sink in there. I have dreamed of having such a case for years! I have owned most of my brushes for some 25 years. I take damn good care of them and now I can take even better care of them, and the new ones I add to them.

I also like some of the synthetic brushes, and while those don’t last too long, I think I can make them last a lot longer than possible, and with the case keeping them clean and pristine, it will make that even easier. And of course, all my sable brushes thank me for having a proper home, even in their old age. I just love this thing. It’s perfect for an anal retentive, meticulous control freak like me.

Finally, I had other meetings. The curator for the show I wound up in at USC Hillel, for instance (see my news page), and a local gallery I have been talking/negotiating/courting for a few months now. And, after this last meeting we both decided to work together, so… Expect an official announcement real soon.