Tip of the Knife, Issue 29

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CONTRIBUTORS

Carol Stetser
Dave Columbus

Francesco Aprile
John Mingay

Robert Keith

Vernon Frazer

Bill DiMichele

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- DRAW BLOOD OR GO HOME -

Carol Stetser

Carol is working with anthropomorphic letterism and she’s doing it quite well.  Deconstructed text- enlarged red letters- Renaissance sepia tone background- each piece has the same fonts as the rest, but they’re all mixed up like Creation’s first moment.  Carol’s cooking, badass cooking, makes the rest of us envious.  And I’m pretty sure some of those figures are Aztec or Inca or something.

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Dave Columbus

I’ve known Dave since elementary school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  I was always excited when my mother would drive me to Dave’s house for a playdate (we were very young).  We drew comics, we read comics and we talked about the comics that ruled our world.  We invented our own characters and supervillains, our own dialogue and captions.  His heroes are dying for action, and I’m dying to read about them.

Dave’s been working in numerous disciplines for 50 years or more.  If I was a soldier, I’d salute you, my friend.  So enjoy Dave’s creativity.  It’s bliss.

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Book of Attular-Squashed Bug

Deadpool-kind word and a gun-final, p4

Earth PD-#3-0-Spider Queen, Dr Styx

 Not my circus. Not my Monkeys, 8 x 10 letter, p4

United Heroes of America-#6-0, p4 cover

Francesco Aprile

A crimson slash opens this chapter, vivid contrasts of red and black, of blood and bruises.  The alphabet, real or imagined, (or if you prefer, real AND imagined) makes appearances on each of these pages, letters bursting their stitches and being bonked on the head.  Dude’s got some serious wounds, body hits all over the place.  A battle-hardened vet of the Visual Poetry wars. 

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John Mingay

PROCESSING

With my phone not being up there with the smart set, its camera is a low quality RGB affair that only takes decent b&w images, all attempts at colour having ceased long ago. With this in mind, then, I decided a photographic vispo project was in the offing, with the camera being used to generate pairs of images initially in b&w and with one or both in each pair including text in one form or another. The intention in taking these images in pairs was that I had already planned to use an app, the highly commendable Toolwiz Photos, to create double exposures, along with introducing colour to the images and manipulating them further. The result was the accompanying set of fifteen vispo pieces.

Strong horizontal bars function like a vice holding double images.  There’s magic in his compositions,  letters overwriting  nebulous images.  Color, from dusky to brilliant, plays a large part, vivid fluorescent projections of other universes.  Words are beings, messages, instructions and a million radio transmissions.   

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two to tango

Robert Keith

R. Keith is the author of Chicken Scratch (EYEAMEYE books), Background (inquieto press), How to design a hail storm (Another new calligraphy), Signature Move (Knives Forks and Spoons) and re: verbs (Bareback editions), as well as four chapbooks. His writing appears in Canadian and international literary journals.

The first thing you’ll notice is the aged yellow stained paper.  Then you’ll notice that the image/text are also quite old.  These illustrations were essential for learning reading skills in the long ago times.  Now they’re essential to experiencing and learning visual poetry.  This is a surreal entanglement of Past remembered, of afternoon sun lighting up the lead paint on the windowsills, of the smell of a mimeograph machine, of the taste of warm milk.  It’s kind of like reading consciousness back into Time/Space.

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Vernon Frazer

The pieces here are composed of tight graphic elements, of the interactions of explosion and smoke, of solid and motion, of text and shape.  I’m convinced that there are angels that comfort Vernon; if anyone deserves their grace it’s him.  Vernon says “near them a sweltering vomit cathedral.” ?!  what the Hell, that’s flippin awesome!   And the rest is just as good, as immense as a city of perfect proportions.

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Bill DiMichele

I started this series of collages using an 8 ½ x 11 format, but as time passed the works slowly shrank in all four dimensions until they reached a diminutive 6” maximum measurement.  Because of this I call the series ‘Sliders’; don’t forget to tip.  20% would be nice.

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ToK #30 will have a special theme- all work will be done by hand and only by hand-absolutely no computers, no phones, no cameras, no hi tech anything.  Include specs.  Due Mayday.  email: julie-d@prodigy.net