Sibyl Rubottom ~ California

Dimity of Blue
By Sibyl Rubottom
Poems by Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats
San Diego: Bay Park Press, 2010. Edition of 10.

4 x 5.75"; 12 pages. Double-sided accordion. Four original silk painting collages. Intaglio covers. Letterpress-printed, painted, and bound at Bay Park Press. Housed in an aqua blue cloth-covered French style clamshell box.

[Dimity: a thin cotton fabric with a texture produced by weaving together yarns of different thicknesses.]

Epigraph:
         Poems for those who have gone before

         "Here lies one who name was writ in water"
                                              Keats headstone - Rome, Italy

Three poems, one each by Neruda (in English translation), Dickinson, and Yeats, accompanied by Rubottom's collage paintings.
$280

The Water Book: Lanes of Thought
By Sibyl Rubottom
San Diego, California: Bay Park Press, 2010. Edition of 10.

23 x 15 x 1.25"; 12 leaves. Intaglio prints, chine-collé, mylar collage prints, and letterpress. Printed on Fabriano Rosapina Bianco in Clarendon 30 point type. Japanese stab binding. Bound in aqua blue silk. Laid in matching cloth clamshell box with hand-painted mylar collage interior.

Colophon:
"'We're all born from water. What could be more natural than to swim all your life in that wonderful weightless medium.' - Esther Williams.

"Esther Williams was my hero growing up on Long Island Sound. I would see each of her movies and try to relive the fabulous water ballet sequences with my girlfriends. These past few years I have been swimming in a beautiful Olympic outdoor pool at the Y in Mission Valley. There are no sharks or seaweed as in my beloved La Jolla Cove. In the pool, palm trees and dappled light line my lanes of thought, perhaps an elephant or two."
$1,850

Animals of Chiapas
By Sibyl Rubottom
San Diego, California: Bay Park Press, 2008. Edition of 50.

4.75 x 5"; 16 unnumbered pages. Accordion structure. Digitally printed. Bound in orange paper-covered boards with illustrated paper title label on front. Signed by the artist.

Sibyl Rubottom, colophon: "This limited edition of the Animals of Chiapas was printed from the original artist's book of drawings done in gouache, watercolor, and crayon of the woolen animals made by the women of San Cristobal in Chiapas, Mexico. These portraits are an attempt to share the warmth and humor that these animals generate."
&75

The Sibyls
By Sibyl Rubottom
San Diego, California: Bay Park Press, 2006. Edition of 10.

12 x 10"; 26 pages. Fold-out pages. Printed on Dutch etching paper in Bodoni, Bernard Modern, Albertus, and Palatino type. Eight intaglio prints plus six color reproductions of five sibyls in the Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and Archne (A Sibyl) by Velasquez. Bound in cloth-covered boards with a title/author plate inset in the top board. Laid in drop-spine clamshell paper-covered box.

This book about sibyls (by a Sibyl) tells of 5 ancient sibyls – the Cumaean, the Delphic, the Erythraean, the Persian, and the Libyan. Short descriptions are accompanied by a intaglio leaf print (because sibyls often wrote their prophecies on leaves) and a color reproduction of the named Sibyl as depicted in Western art.

Introduction: "The dream comes again each night. How to move the plates? Unearth the prophecies of the leaves, layers of moss, earth covering the truth. What leaves say what? How to tell each tale of each Sibyl? What do the veins of the leaves reveal? How do we know what is true? What is myth, layers of folk tales, direct link to the divine? It's How we read the light. The golden October directional rays shifting to spring slants throughout the short shadows of winter, blunt rendering of truth. Prayers answered, divine voices listened to. Compass set right again to true north. Thank you, chorus, hosannahs to the highest, in excelsis deo. Did she give the recipe for gelato with the leaves? The Armani secrets of couture, were they depicted in the leaves, in the underworld? How did she know? Reading the veins, tracing patterns of each intersecting century. A geological survey of truth."

Sibyl Rubottom, colophon: "... to the father I never knew who named me Sibyl hoping I would be shrewd in business. That did not occur, but I did end up making books."
$1,500

Tutti e due
By Sibyl Rubottom
San Diego: Bay Park Press, 2005. Edition of 10.

9.25 x 13.25 "; diptych. English text set in 18 point Bodoni. Italian in 14 point Bodoni. Fabriano paper. Letterpress printed. Handcut and handpainted with silk portfolio box. Housed in cloth covered clamshell box. Handpainted interior case papers.

A poem by Sibyl Rubottom. Translated by Al Rubottom.

The book comes in a dream every fortnight,
triangular pages push out, alternate with flat ones.
Folds slip past the memory line, the equator of
thoughts and emotions blurring the dotted lines

$800

Ten Elephants
By Sibyl Rubottom
2004. Edition of 15.

Ten hand tinted etchings on Fabriano paper.

Sibyl Rubottom: "Each book of 15 is a meditation and a remover of obstacles for the artist."
$500