Flashback Friday: Modigliani concertina

Less than a month before my trip to Italy was the first time I'd ever heard of the Italian artist Amedeo Clemente Modigliani. With her usual sense of adventure at Blockbuster, my mom rented a little-known movie on a whim, and this movie introduced us both to someone who is now one of my favorite artists. And as it turned out, there was an exhibit of Modigliani's paintings on display in Rome while I was in the city. Seeing the vivid portraits in person, especially the haunting absent eyes, solidified his work in my ranking of favorites. I soaked in the experience, and was one of the last in our group to leave the gallery.

And as if this Modigliani coincidence wasn't enough, there's more to the story. Several weeks later, I was wandering through a flea market in Perugia, a city in Umbria known for its chocolate, when I found a lovely vintage book filled with images of Modigliani's work.

I was taking a book arts and papermaking class in Cortona that summer, and decided to reconstruct the book into several creations of my own. I ended up using four of the color images from my flea market find to make this double concertina book, with several smaller black and white images serving both structural and decorative purposes. The covers were made using some informative pages from the book, and a cutout of Modigliani's signature serves as the title.

This is one of my favorite books that I made during my time in Italy, for both aesthetic and sentimental reasons. It was displayed in La Mostra, an art exhibition in Cortona, as well as a show at the University of Georgia once I returned to the States.

While in Italy, I also made another Modigliani book, which I will include in a future Flashback Friday post. I still have the original covers and some of the pages from the original antique book, and perhaps I will use them to make a third book in the future.