Jan Owen – Stuck

Oh, STUCK!—I dread you. “Stuck” sounds frozen but when stuck, I flail, thinking maybe this will work, no, maybe that . . . or worse, maybe I’ll never have a good idea again. I need hope like Charles Dickens that “something will turn up.” I read poetry, make notes of ideas, copy lots of texts, spread out handmade papers, look at art books, make brush marks to music, write words with brushes and cardboard, and hope that something turns up.

In this anxious, political year I turned to a print I found during another stressful time. The print is of a Chinese scroll by Qian Xuan who painted with delicate brushstrokes a marsh with dragonflies, fish, and frogs—a captured moment from the 14th century. Being present is a mantra through the ages and I began collecting words by various writers and adding my own marginalia. I cut them up, arranged them (rearranged them), and folded the handmade papers for an artist book, Stay Now. I began in the middle with the blue brushstroke, the most important mark. I don’t plan ahead very much so each step needs patience to begin, to consider, and reconsider until it looks right. Stay Now is ready to sew together and I’m in the last dangerous phase when I don’t know when to stop. I leave it and take walks.

But sometimes I go on and do too much and write words all over with no quiet space, just too much. I hide the pieces away and after a while I’m able to cut them up to make something new. The Mind’s Eye is one result and became an accordion flag book. It was a fun process of cutting the heads from old paste decorated papers with lettering and then glueing them onto the folds. I wanted to show how we walk around with our heads full of words. Illuminated is a similar artist book showing illuminated letters with binary code.

In 2023, I was invited to submit work to an exhibit, The Freedom Project at the Book Arts Museum in Lódź, Poland. Before I studied lettering, I’d made lithographs but they didn’t “say enough.” I got them out and combined them with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech to make Everywhere. Thanks to Google Translate, the text is in English and Polish on red paper. I added gold binary code and a red target for not feeling free of fear to the prints.

On very bad stuck days the question is why? Why am I writing with a metal dip pen in our age of computers? I remind myself that I love words and want to show them to you. I love the slow process of writing, the feel of paper—and why not?