PUBLICATION CENTER

Mona Mark’s watercolor studies fly off the page, thanks to Kim Lorang’s treatment in a custom art book she created for Mark’s work. Lorang, who owns Visual Winds in Schenectady, N.Y., used the contrast of light and heavy materials to highlight and provide a sense of motion to Mark’s art.

“There are so many different types of media to print on prepped for inkjet giclee, that it’s a lot of fun to reproduce art for my clients. Some images scream for something different and require something that really accents the artwork itself. It changes the presentation and makes it more alive. It’s great to find an artist who will work with you on that,” says Lorang. “Ultimately, my job is to help the artist succeed. A unique book provides a real sales tool for my artists because it is so difficult for artists to put together a distinguished portfolio.”

Lorang found that experimenting with the different materials now available for artwork and photographic reproduction, such as a plethora of fine-art papers for any taste and a range of fabrics, combined with inexpensive photo book systems provides artists with an avenue for creative presentations.

In this case, Lorang used Hahnemuhle’s William Turner 190 g contrasted with 3P Polyvoile fabric in a 12x12 art book to showcase Mona Mark’s watercolor bird study. The Polyvoile is used as an overlay of the same image over the William Turner. The fabric suggests flight and motion, giving the images additional lift.

“It’s not a technique you can do with everything, but when she showed me the watercolor studies I knew it would work. If you have the book lying open the images offset, which looks really nice,” says Lorang. “And, the nice thing about the square format is that you’re not restricted by horizontal or vertical images.”

To build the book, Lorang ganged up the images into one large file, printed them on an Epson 9800, cut them out as single pages, stacked them, and inserted them in the Unibind book-binding system, which uses heat to bind the album together. While Lorang says this process is a bit labor intensive, it allows for the conservation of media, and permits tight registration between the fabric overlays and the underlying images.

As a supporting piece for the artist’s work, an art book like this can generate additional merchandising sales and similar large-format display prints. For instance, the book concept can be enlarged on canvas with fabric offsets at a gallery that mirrors the look and feel of the art book.

“If a gallery relies solely on art sales, it can be difficult to make a living, so this is a good merchandizing idea for galleries. If a gallery can rely on other types of art presentations for income, they can be more flexible with the percentage they share with the artist,” says Lorang.