Barbara Stauffacher Solomon

WHY?

80 YEARS IN 42,636 WORDS AND 60 PICTURES

Preface by BSS

Why WHY?

Why these 6 segments of autobiography interspersed with 8 series of drawings sometimes seemingly unrelated to the words? Well, in lining up 80 years in 42,757 words and 60 drawings, I find that each line, lie, liaison, and landscape lead to the next and definitely relates to the rest.

When young, I catapulted back and forth between San Francisco, Basel, and New York, manifesting the times in big bright bold supergraphic letterforms and stripes on large walls of buildings until events scaled me down and I started to type words and draw lines with graphite and colored pencils on small pieces of paper. The Sixties were over.

In 1970, I sat in one place and became obsessed with 8 l/2-by-11-inch rectangles of white paper. The game was to make something out of nothing. Without fuss. Without mess. Nothing to it. Each sheet was clean and clear. Each a perfect piece of emptiness. No sediment.No sentiment. I belonged to them. Anything was possible on a piece of white paper. I typed lines. I drew lines. I cut-and-pasted typed lines with drawn lines. Lines of furrows became lines of words, lines of poplars became columns of text, and rectangles of words centered on a page and enclosed by wide white margins becamegreenrectangles of grass in the center of a city or freeway signs signaling various paradoxical paradise out-of-sight. Year after year, one piece of 8 l/2-by-11-inch white paper lead to the next piece of 8 l/2-by-11-inch white paper until they became Green Architecture and the Agrarian Garden and Good Mourning California.

In WHY? I've drawn and typed letters that line up into words, words that line up in straight lines, one word after another, one line after the other, one line on top of another, until letterforms are landscapes, while an occasional Y-not-knot knotty lady (me) looks on from across the binding, glued.

Originally my text was long. Now it's short. You can fantasize the parts cut out, personal stuff, gossip about men andgreatgrandmothers, words my young granddaughter can someday find waiting in my file for her to read. Maybe the best parts? Invisible?

How does the look of each word (shape, size, color, typeface) affect the meaning of the word? It is said that letters have no meaning by themselves. We line them up into words according to specific rules. Do the rules divulge the meaning? What does each letter says to the next? Does the shape of each word reveal it's meaning to initiates who possess the secret key? Are words, like landscapes, invisible to tourists?

Art teachers talk about "positive shapes" and "negative space." Negative as if marked by denial. But the negative allows the positive. Are there secret meanings in the white shapes inside letters, between letters, between words, between the lines, and in the white margins that hold, control, and shape lines, lies, letters, ladies, and land(e)scapes, spaces unnoticed, in the background, unseen, behind the scenes, in the open space of the sky between things?

WHY NOT?