Krause, Dorothy Simpson, book artist; Robert Louis Stevenson, poet
American Samoa: Dorothy Simpson Krause, 2018-2022. Hardcover. Number 2 of 2 copies signed and numbered by the book artist. Dorothy Krause is a painter, collage artist and printmaker who incorporates digital mixed media into her art. Her work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and featured in numerous current periodicals and books. In her artist's statement she says: "My work includes large scale mixed media pieces, artist books and book-like objects that bridge between these two forms. It embeds archetypal symbols and fragments of image and text in multiple layers of texture and meaning. It combines the humblest of materials, plaster, tar, wax and pigment, with the latest in technology to evoke the past and herald the future. My art-making is an integrated mode of inquiry that links concept and media in an ongoing dialogue – a visible means of exploring meaning" Many of her books, like this, have been inspired by her travels.
She writes in her colophon: "In 1889 Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, settled in the Samoan islands in Vailima, a home he built for his extended family. Immersing himself in the culture, he became a reporter and an agitator, alarmed above all by what he perceived as the Samoans' economic innocence. In 1894 just months before his death, he addressed the island chiefs 'There is but one way to defend Samoa. Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely ... if you do not occupy and use your country, others will. It will not continue to be yours or your children's.' Stevenson died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1894 at the age of 44. The Samoans bore him on their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epigraph, his poem Requiem, included in this book, was translated to a Samoan song of grief. He wrote: Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie, Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This is the verse you grave for me, Here he lies where he longed to be, Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
This evocative work was done in mixed media, with images of Stevenson in white in photos with Samoans, his portrait, and an image of his grave. Pages are done in brown and orange tones, with faint facsimiles of Steveson's handwriting, and the poem printed along the bottom margins. In a drum-leaf binding, with vintage orange and black tapa cloth wraps on the cover and the top of the book's box. Tapa cloth is bark cloth, or tapa, is not a woven material, but made from bark that has been softened through a process of soaking and beating. Housed in a box with the colophon printed on the boom of the interior. In fine condition. Measures 5 x 7 inches. Unpaginated [24 pages]. ARTB/051923. Fine. More