FINNEGAN'S FACEBOOK
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
Text selections from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
6" X 7 3/4",  38 pages housed in a plexiglass box 

While visiting the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus, I came across a manuscript  which had a collection of delightful Blackletter capitals that were decorated with amusing drawings of faces. This became the inspiration for the November 2014 Cafe Chronicles book.  The large capitals were initially created  in my studio followed by the drawings which were made each morning  at Cafe Puccini. The text passages, selections from Finnegans Wake, were added back in the studio. This book is the closest I come to having anything to do with the real world FACEBOOK (thumbs down).

CAGE’S MUSES ON WORDS, ART,  AND MUSIC
Writings by John Cage  
Calligraphy and Drawing by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA, 2014
Unique Book
14.5  x 10 inches,   20 pages

This book is a visual expression of  selections from Cage's percussive works and various thoughts on Words, art, and music. The “image only” pages of the book were created spontaneously while listening to  compositions from the Third Construction and Credo in US. The calligraphic texts, from Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage,  and Sounds of the Inner Eye, ed. by Wulf Herzogenrath and Andreas Kreul, attempt  also to portray images of visual musical. The book is now part of the  collection at the Library of Congress.

Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
Poetry by Robert Sheppard
Musical composition by Clifford Burke
Unique Book

Cafe Chronicles, February 2014
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  36 pages

The February 2014 drawings were all done in Cafe Puccini. Many pages of the book had previously made calligraphic elements including letters from the alphabet, short texts, and abstract drawings. Also, towards the end of the month I added short poems and parts of poems by Kaye McDonough who I met one morning at the cafe.  "Paris in the twenties lasted forty years," is one of her poems. Kaye was a long time North Beach poet/resident who now lives and teaches on the East Coast. She was in town to do a reading at City Lights. I am thinking to continue with the idea of juxtaposing and drawing with a poem on a daily basis. It seems like an activity that  would  be good for one's mind.  It also enables me to explore curious relationships between words and image.

Cafe Chronicles, December, 2013
Calligraphy and Drawings by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, CA,  2013
Unique Book
5.5 x 7.5 inches,  36 pages

The December drawings were all done in Cafe Puccini. Each month I try to  add or change my approach to creating the pages. Some months I have used color. Other months I have pasted collage elements on the pages before beginning. In months where I have not  made this kind of beginning, I wait for something to happen, or just enjoy  observing how the act of drawing each day changes what I do or how I see a page. In mid month of this book, for no explicable reason, I happened to change my process by creating  the drawings before writing the date; the result  being that the drawing and writing seemed to be more integrated both in character and  in composition. 

Open Secrets: Ode to Jackson Mac Low
A visual/verbal Book by Thomas Ingmire
San Francisco, 2013 
Unique book
16 x 13 inches, 20 pages

Jackson Mac Low, (1922-2004) was an American Poet known particularly for his experimental approaches to poetry, musical compositions, and performance art.  Inspired in part by John Cage, Mac Low employed systematic chance operations and other similar non-intentional methods in his work. This book is a visual response to the audio performance work titled Open Secrets, by Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos. There are ten selections. Most of the works are multi-track voice compositions, while others are instrumental pieces. Specific words are sometimes discernible, but most of the time the voices are used as instruments of sound.

The pages of this book are visual mark making responses the Open Secrets pieces. The instrumental works are depicted with abstract marks, while the voice compositions have been created with layers of hand written and stencil made words. The book itself is an expression of sound. Some of the pages crackle when the pages are turned, others move in silence. 

Suites Song
Poetry by Federico García Lorca
Drawings and calligraphy by Thomas Ingmire 
San Francisco, 2010
Unique book
7.75 x 10 inches, 28 pages

This book was inspired by my work with Manuel Neri and the poetry of Lorca. Most of the work that I had done with the collaboration had involved, for lack of better words, Lorca's more despairing poetry. I wanted to do something fairly straightforward with a few of his lighter, more playful poems. I chose three poems and balanced them against simple watercolor figure drawings. With the drawings I wanted to capture the directness and simplicity of form seen in Manuel Neri's drawings.

Suites Song is available from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers